The spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, Maj Gen Turki al-Maliki, said the Houthi drone and missile attacks targeted civilian and economic sites in the cities of Abha, Khamis Mushait, Jazan and Najran, and that women and children were among the injured.
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An energy ministry statement cited an official source as saying that injuries were also reported after "several energy sector facilities and installations" were targeted.
The attacks "caused fires at several locations, leading to a temporary halt in some operations," they added.
Maliki described Houthi attacks as a "dangerous escalation that confirms the hostile and irresponsible approach of this terrorist militia" and said the Saudi-led coalition would "take all necessary operational measures to deter" the group.
Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea accused the Saudi military of carrying out more than 120 air strikes on the Yemeni provinces of Marib, al-Bayda, Hudaydah, Taiz and Jawf over the past three days, and of committing "grave crimes".
He said the Houthis had responded to this "brutal aggression" with "dozens of ballistic missiles and drones", which he claimed caused "significant damage".
A Saudi-led coalition of Arab states has backed Yemen's government against the Houthis in the country's devastating civil war for more than a decade.
A four-year-old informal ceasefire began to unravel in July, when the Houthis announced a "maritime embargo" against Saudi Arabia and began missile and drone attacks on Saudi airports, oil facilities and tankers in the Red Sea.
The Houthis said they were retaliating for a Saudi blockade of ports and airports in their territory, as well as an air strike on Sanaa airport that they blamed on the kingdom.
There has been heavy fighting on Yemen's south-western coast since Thursday, when the Houthis launched an offensive against Yemeni pro-government forces in a bid to take control of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.
The fighting has reportedly left more than 300 people dead and displaced 18,500.
The Red Sea has become crucial for oil shipments from Saudi Arabia during the US and Israel's war with Iran, which has led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf. %!s()
For the past two years, most enterprise conversations about AI have centered on generation: models that draft text, summarize documents or suggest a snippet of code. That era is giving way to something more consequential. Agentic AI—autonomous systems that can plan a task, write and test code, call APIs, and deploy changes with limited human intervention—is moving out of pilots and into production. In software engineering alone, autonomous agents are beginning to take on work that used to require an entire team.
…
AI Is Moving From Answers To Actions
This shift is exciting, and it is also a different security problem. For most of the AI wave, the risk we managed was what a model would say. With agentic AI, the risk is what a system will do. An agent does not just produce an answer; it takes actions inside your environment, against your data, with real consequences. That single change, from generation to action, is why the security model that served the last wave will not carry us through the next one.
Having led security architecture for large, regulated financial platforms, I have watched capable teams reach for their existing playbook and find that it does not quite fit. Treating an autonomous agent as just another application behind an API gateway underestimates what it can do. The good news is that securing agentic AI does not require inventing a new discipline. It requires applying a few familiar principles with unusual deliberateness, and building them in from the start rather than adding them after something goes wrong. Here is the control baseline I would put in place before letting an autonomous agent anywhere near production.
1. Treat The Agent As An Accountable Identity, Not A Tool
The most useful shift is to stop thinking of an agent as software and start treating it as a non-human actor that must be governed like any privileged identity. Give it a distinct, named identity. Scope its permissions to the specific task rather than to a broad service account it inherits by default. Apply least privilege without exception, and make sure every action it takes is attributable back to that identity. If you cannot answer the question of “Who did this, and were they allowed to?” then you are not ready to deploy.
2. Keep Humans In The Loop Where It Matters
Autonomy is the point of these systems, but unbounded autonomy in a regulated environment is a liability. The discipline is to decide, in advance, which actions require human review before they take effect and to build those gates into the workflow rather than relying on people to remember to check. Code moving toward production, changes that touch sensitive data and any action with irreversible consequences should pass a human review gate. This is not about slowing the agent down everywhere; it is about placing friction precisely where the cost of a mistake is highest.
3. Build The Controls In From The Start
Security by design is an old idea, but agentic AI makes it urgent again. Run the agent in an isolated, sandboxed environment so that what it produces is created and tested without touching live systems until it has cleared review. Put explicit guardrails on what it is permitted to attempt. Decide up front how it authenticates, what it can reach and what it must never reach. Retrofitting these controls after a deployment is already live is far harder, and far riskier, than designing them in from day one.
4. Make Everything Auditable
When an autonomous system is taking actions on your behalf, logging is not a convenience; it is the mechanism that keeps the system under accountable human control. Every action the agent takes, every change it proposes and every resource it touches should be recorded in a form your own auditors and your regulators can review. The goal is a complete, tamper-resistant trail that lets you reconstruct exactly what happened and demonstrate that AI-driven activity stayed within its boundaries. In regulated sectors, this is often the difference between a technology you can adopt and one you cannot.
5. Agree On A Control Baseline Your Risk And Compliance Partners Will Accept, Before You Scale
The fastest way to stall an agentic-AI program is to build it in isolation and present it to risk leadership at the very end. The better path is to define—together with your security, risk and compliance functions—the baseline of controls an agent must meet to operate and to map that baseline to the frameworks you already use. Do not treat AI as exempt from the standards you apply to everything else. When the baseline is agreed early, each new agent inherits it, and the cost and risk of every additional deployment falls rather than rising.
Autonomy And Accountability Must Scale Together
None of these principles is exotic. What is new is the discipline of applying them to a system that acts on its own. The organizations that get the most from agentic AI will not be the ones that move fastest with the least control, and they will not be the ones that freeze out of caution. They will be the ones that treat security as a design input from the first day, so that autonomy and accountability scale together.
Agentic AI is going to reshape how software is built and how work gets done, and it will do so faster than most governance processes are ready for. That is precisely why the security model has to lead rather than follow. Decide how you will give these systems identity, oversight, isolation, auditability and an agreed control baseline before they are running in production, not after. Get that foundation right and you can adopt this technology with confidence instead of fear. Get it wrong and the speed you gained will be the least of what you lose.
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Kristian Matsson returned to his native Sweden to make Just Beyond Endless Mountain, a record rooted in nature: “I get more cynical, but I search for the moments you get to be in awe of how cool a tree is”
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Kristian Matsson, otherwise known as the Tallest Man on Earth, was up at 5 a.m. to play the fiddle. He spent the rest of the morning getting his hands dirty: foraging for mushrooms, doing chores around his property, surveying progress at the concert hall he’s renovating 10 minutes away, where he’s functioning right now as both owner and janitor. “I’ve been a caricature of myself today,” says Matsson, calling on Zoom in a red flannel while light pours in through the window behind him.
A lot of his days are just like this. Fixing things and writing songs, touring around on his ATV, tending to the horses. It might all sound like a scene from the Appalachian hollers where Matsson once turned to for sonic inspiration, but he’s actually in Sweden: in the county of Dalarna, where he was born. This is his full-time home now, after years of living in Brooklyn and almost two decades and seven albums of chasing American sonic traditions. More often than not, he’s just a guy on his lawnmower here, checking out the horizon.
“I get older and more cynical and all that, but I search for the moments you get to be in awe of how cool a tree is,” Matsson says with a laugh, aware of how that sentence might make him sound like he was foraging for something a little more hallucinogenic than savory. “I’m not on mushrooms, I promise,” he assures me. “Just food mushrooms.”
Matsson’s settling in here is more than just a matter of place. Since childhood, he’s run away from the Swedish folk traditions that defined his country and his youth: the fiddles, the flutes, the embroidered costumes, the polska dances. That kind of stuff was for tourists who wanted to duck in and out for the Midsommer celebrations in cheap flower crowns, the music itself too soft and “rounded in the edges,” Matsson says. “Of course, I started listening to punk rock instead and wanted to be Iggy Pop. I just didn’t want to be a fiddler in a weird costume.” He discovered Bob Dylan and Delta blues, which were much more exciting than what was happening just outside his window.
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Matsson’s new album, Just Beyond Endless Mountain, finds him no longer running from those traditions, embracing the sounds of his Swedish heritage in these urgent, emotionally captivating folk songs. He no longer shuns the flute or the fiddle, and he realized that none of these traditions are really all that different when you break things down to the basics. “I’ve been learning a lot of Skip James songs, and the tonality is very comparable to some of the field recordings over here,” he says. “How you treat a minor key or major key. It’s even the same words, but in Swedish, as an old ballad from England or banjo music or the blues.”
It all happened a little bit by accident. Matsson came home to the farm he’s owned in Dalarna during Covid, and he wasn’t planning on staying permanently. But when restrictions were lifted and he hit the road again on tour, the pull to stay in America just wasn’t as strong as it had always been. A serious relationship ended, and, most importantly, his father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, which found Matsson wanting to connect much more closely with the land and the culture that raised him. It also made the stark differences in healthcare between the two countries seem imminently apparent.
“Even though I am a 43-year-old white dude and the world is created for me, at least there’s something psychological about knowing there’s a safety net here,” Matsson says about living in Sweden. “It’s not as aggressively capitalist as it is over in America, which for me can really hollow out the daydreaming. I’m not pointing fingers at just America; we’re messed up here too. We’re all responsible for this planet. But there are a lot of things going on, and it’s a little draining for the optimist in you.”
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Matsson grew up with America, and American music, as the holy grail — the folk and blues icons like Dylan and James, the punk bands, the counterculture. He still loves it all, but he found himself becoming “curious about what he had taken for granted” back in Sweden. Curious not about what a life would look like (or what his music would sound like) if he returned to where he came from, but if he crafted a new future where he could embrace latent sides of himself and his own history, and make them a natural part of his creative story.
When Matsson’s father died in 2024, that curiosity only grew. Anyone who has lost a loved one to Alzheimer’s or dementia knows that, even before they’re physically gone, it’s a long, excruciating process of loss. “I had this feeling that I hadn’t said goodbye,” he says. “That I hadn’t asked him all the questions.” Part of finding those answers meant going back to his father’s roots, and his own. The music that existed just outside his window and peppered his childhood. Picking up the fiddle, an instrument that “bit me every time I picked it up,” diving into field recordings of Swedish folk music. He found not just nostalgia, but joy.
“It was the same thing, and the same curiosity and awe, as when I was digging into Appalachian music or Delta blues,” Matsson says.
The first songs he started to write about his father were understandably sad. He didn’t think that’s what his dad, who was his “biggest fan,” would have wanted. “My dad was a very happy, social person,” Matsson says. “He laughed at his own jokes, but it was charming and he could talk to anyone. He was just a beautiful spirit, and he wouldn’t like for me to be moping this whole album through. So I threw away those lyrics and rewrote a lot. I cut off some branches here and there, and ended up with loving songs.”
Just Beyond Endless Mountain feels loving, pastoral, and raw, with long fiddle solos, flute that dances around the lyrics and scores of other orchestral instruments, most that Matsson plays himself. Sometimes, they feel dreamlike; others, like field recordings of his life as he tries to find the light (“even in these shit times, I still love you,” he sings on “Times”). The delightfully tender “Overboda” was written for a friend’s wedding: he started out on the fiddle, but then set it to guitar so he could play it while crying (“thank God, because I was just bawling,” he remembers of the ceremony). Though born out of disarray and deep grief, the songs carry a contentment that can only come by finding a way to fuse who we were with who we are and making peace with the past.
He also thinks about the one cultural frontier he hasn’t crossed yet: making albums in his native language. He’s been writing here and there in Swedish, but it’s “super scary and extremely naked,” Matsson says. That would probably be a side project, because he likes touring in America too much. The fiddles, however, are here to stay. He opens his show with one now, a traditional polska, even though he doesn’t consider himself anywhere near an expert at the instrument.
But being imperfect, and learning, is part of the point. Matsson fights with his phone for attention like anyone else, “with apps to shut off my apps” to help resist the urge to doomscroll when boredom comes around. Building his concert hall, where he hopes to host all sorts of music, dance, and theater productions, is his own sort of counternarrative to a world where AI looms. He was watching an interview with someone from AI company Suno recently, and it pissed him off to no end.
“He was sitting there talking, saying, ‘Musicians used to have to do this dreadful work of finishing songs and struggling with them,’” Matsson says. “’And now, we’re taking away that struggle.’ And just, you have no idea, tech bro. You’ve missed the whole point of art and creating.”
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Matsson, like Just Beyond Endless Mountain, is hopeful without being naive. He looks to his community, to his culture, to the youth as his radar. He noticed that more bands are popping up lately — kids playing distorted guitars and turning the amps up loud.
“To see an emo kid, I get teary-eyed,” Matsson says. “I think nature is just trying to heal itself.” %!s()
As far as Summers go, 2026 offered plenty of reasons to get out of house, from the surprisingly fantastic Minions & Monsters to two Earth-shattering blockbusters in The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Even August had its highlights with the very fun The End of Oak Street and the long-anticipated — and incredibly funny — Coyote vs. ACME.
… %!s()
But that’s all over now and it's time to turn our primary attention from the big screen to the small screen. The fall season is jam-packed with new TV shows like VisionQuest and Crystal Lake, as well as returning favorites like Scrubs and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Here are the 10 most anticipated shows of the fall with a focus on sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and animation — and you can find even more shows and scoops in our 2026 Fall Preview.
10
Scrubs
Image: 20th Television
The early 2000s hospital comedy about quirky doctors returned last year for its first season since 2010 (or 2009 if you correctly don’t count the ninth season). While there was skepticism about whether the reboot could recapture the charming voice of the original, pretty much everyone agreed it did. The revival began with Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) appointing his former protégé J.D. (Zach Braff) as the new Chief of Medicine at Sacred Heart Hospital, a position which, surprisingly, didn’t rob the character of how fun he had been in the original series. The revival also managed to bring a fair amount of heart, particularly with the reveal of Dr. Cox’s medical condition.
Season 11 of Scrubs will premiere on ABC on Sept. 30.
9
Dig
Image: Colleen Hayes/Peacock
Not to be mistaken with Tom Cruise’s upcoming comedy Digger, Dig is a new sitcom starring Amy Poehler. Not much is known about the series except that Poehler is playing an archaeologist who, along with a few other archaeologists, uncovers a big secret on a dig in Greece. Despite the scant details, there’s good reason to be excited. For one thing, Amy Poehler is returning to television, and she’s doing it with executive producer Mike Schur, one of the co-creators of Poehler’s beloved sitcom Parks and Recreation. So with Schur and Poehler onboard, this show seems very promising.
Dig will premiere on Peacock on Nov. 23.
8
Crystal Lake
Image: A24
Few horror franchises are as iconic or successful as the Friday the 13th films, but it's been 17 long years since we've seen Jason Voorhees onscreen due to various legal rights issues. Thankfully, that drought is finally over — sort of. Crystal Lake from Callum Vinson (It: Welcome to Derry) is bringing the franchise back to the beginning — actually, before the beginning.
If you recall the original 1980 film Friday the 13th, the iconic hockey-mask-wearing Jason was not yet the villain of the franchise. In that first movie, it’s Jason’s mom who's doing the killing around Camp Crystal Lake summer camp as she seeks vengeance for the death of her son. Crystal Lake series will tell the story before the events of the first film, with Linda Cardellini as Jason's mother, Pamela Voorhees.
The eight-episode first season of Crystal Lake will drop all of its episodes on Peacock on Oct. 15.
7
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Photo: Aidan Monaghan/HBO
Nobody wanted HBO Max’s new Harry Potter show. The celebrated series of movies starring Daniel Radcliffe is still very fresh in people's minds, and it hardly seems necessary to re-adapt the saga right now, especially while Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling is an unrepentant transphobic bigot. Still, the sheer volume of talent involved with the upcoming Harry Potter series can’t help but attract attention.
Nick Frost is an extraordinarily good casting choice for Hagrid, and Paapa Essiedu is an intriguing pick for Severus Snape. The actor I’m most excited to see, though, is John Lithgow as Dumbledore. I also tend to think that it’d be interesting to see how much more from the books the series will be able to include, as the movie necessarily had to cut a lot out. Perhaps this series will end up being as pointless as everyone originally thought, but so far, it’s definitely not looking that way.
The eight-episode first season premieres on HBO Max on Dec. 25.
6
South Park season 29
Image: South Park Studios
For much of its run, South Park had mostly stayed out of politics, with creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker generally choosing to lampoon popular culture instead. However, for seasons 27 and 28, which aired back-to-back last year, the show about four vulgar young boys in Colorado went all-in on its bashing of President Donald Trump. Frequently depicting him entirely naked, the show portrayed Trump as a petulant, evil narcissist with a small — well, it’s South Park, so you can probably figure out what part of Trump’s anatomy they repeatedly portrayed as being too small.
The weekly swipes at Trump were so relentless that they made headlines each week and even got some direct attention from Trump himself. While some fans — likely Trump supporters who can’t take a joke — rankled at the political turn, many found it hilarious and it gave South Park the most relevance it’s had in years.
The show will return on Sept.16 for its 29th season, with semi-weekly releases after that. The release schedule may change mid-season, too, just like it did last year. Regardless of how quickly the episodes come out, I can only hope they double-down on what they did last season, which is often what Stone and Parker do when people tell them not to do something.
5
Blade Runner 2099
Image: Amazon MGM Studios
Denis Villeneuve's 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049 may have been liked by critics, but the movie failed to be the massive blockbuster it needed to be to make back all the money poured into it. Still, for those who turned out for the movie, they saw that the Blade Runner franchise still had some good stories to tell in its neon-lit dystopia populated with replicants (bio-engineered slave laborers).
This go-around, executive producer Ridley Scott (who directed the original 1982 film), has teamed up with Shining Girls creator Silka Luisa for the Prime Video series Blade Runner 2099, an eight-episode miniseries with an intriguing twist. Instead of the replicants being the second-class citizens, they’ve now taken over the city of Los Angeles and the humans are the ones that are oppressed.
All episodes of Blade Runner 2099 will drop on Nov. 25.
4
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 3
Image: Amazon MGM Studios
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is set thousands of years before the Lord of the Rings movies and tells the story of Middle-earth’s Second Age (as opposed to the Third Age covered by Peter Jackson's films). In the course of the series, Sauron's Rings of Power are forged as part of a plot to sneakily conquer all of Middle-earth and subjugate its many inhabitants. Season 3, which premieres on Nov. 11 on Prime Video, will see Sauron forge the One Ring, a powerful weapon that will help him defeat his enemies.
Response to the series has been mixed thus far, perhaps because, unlike the more faithful films which were directly based on J. R. R. Tolkien's novels, The Rings of Power extrapolates a lot more, building its own mythology based loosely on the appendices of the original books. Some don’t see it as canon for this reason, but The Rings of Power has properly captured the scale and scope of The Lord of the Rings, even if it is a television series and not a theatrical film. And because of the sheer size of the production, and some interesting story choices, it's at least worth checking out.
Four episodes will drop on Nov. 11. After that, the season’s remaining four episodes will drop soon after, with two episodes on November 18 and another two on Nov. 25.
3
Carrie
Image: Robert Falconer/Prime Video
Stephen King’s 1974 novel Carrie, and its 1976 adaptation directed by Brian De Palma, are still as good as ever. The supernatural thriller story about a telekinetic teenager who lashes out at her bullying classmates at prom has spawned a number of remakes, and now there’s a TV miniseries in the works with the prolific Mike Flanagan at the helm. If you’re unfamiliar with Flanagan, he’s the showrunner behind a bunch of Netflix horror series like The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher. He’s also behind the Stephen King film adaptations Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep. While yet another Carrie adaptation hardly seems necessary, in Flanagan’s hands, it automatically becomes one of the fall’s most anticipated shows. Flanagan’s choice to set the series in modern times in a setting where school shootings and cyber-bullying have sadly become the norm also puts a clever twist on the iconic tale.
The six-episode series will drop all at once on Prime Video on Oct. 7.
2
VisionQuest
Image: Disney/Marvel Studios
Most Marvel Cinematic Universe shows have been pretty bad or forgettable, but both WandaVision and Agatha All Along were fun stories that didn’t drag in the middle, unlike the majority of the others. With that, the hope is VisionQuest, which is being marketed as the conclusion to the WandaVision trilogy, will be on-par with those two. Paul Bettany’s work as Vision in various Marvel movies and TV shows has always been intriguing and entertaining. He’s a strong lead, so, assuming the writing is on-point for this series, VisionQuest looks promising.
The story is about Vision re-discovering who he is after coming back online in WandaVision. While the now-white-colored android has his memories back, he still has to restore his personality and humanity. The show looks like it's tackling this in a trippy, experimental way, with the inclusion of a human version of Ultron (James Spader) residing in Vision’s programming.
Whether this is an interesting link in the chain which leads to Avengers: Doomsday or merely a conclusion for Vision’s journey, it should prove interesting to see.
The eight-episode series VisionQuest will have a weekly rollout and debut on Disney Plus on Oct. 14.
1
Avatar: Seven Havens
Avatar: The Last Airbender was one of the greatest animated series of all time. In a world where tribes of “benders” can manipulate the elements of water, earth, fire, or air, a young boy named Aang is the last airbender and the current “Avatar,” the only person who can bend all four elements. Over three seasons, the show told a complete and pretty much perfect story, which is why some feared that its 2012 sequel series, The Legend of Korra, wouldn’t measure up. Fortunately, The Legend of Korra, which followed the story of Aang’s Avatar successor, Korra, was on par with the original.
Hopefully the third series, which follows the new Avatar named Pavi, can replicate the success of its two predecessors.
The new series will premiere on Oct. 9, on Paramount Plus, with a 13-episode first season. A second season will be coming sometime in the future, with another 13 episodes. %!s()
Cairo, Egypt – Four days after he disappeared from the Egyptian team camp at the 2026 Under-20 World Wrestling Championships in Slovakia last month, 19-year-old wrestler Ziad Hajjaj Abu Gabal posted a message on Facebook.
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“I don’t want my mother and father to be upset with me,” he wrote on August 29. “I did this so I could see myself as a man. I won’t go back to Egypt, my beloved country, until I bring it honour.
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“Everything I earn in a month is 700 Egyptian pounds [$13.7], and I’m an international [athlete] … After all this pressure, there was no way I could go back.”
On August 27, another Egyptian wrestler, Mohamed al-Shami, 23, had escaped while his team transited through Rome on their way home from the Mediterranean Games in Taranto, Italy.
In his Facebook post on August 29, Al-Shami said he had come to feel like a financial burden on his family and that he wanted to start earning money for them.
“At a certain point I felt my father was exhausted, that life had become too hard for him,” he wrote. “I’m the eldest of my siblings, so someone had to make a sacrifice and take responsibility.”
While the authorities in Egypt may now try to take legal action against the two athletes, their posts drew a wave of sympathy from Egyptians on Facebook, with many saying they understood the pressures that pushed the athletes to escape from a country mired in poverty.
Indeed, Hajjaj and al-Shami are far from the first Egyptian wrestlers to flee while abroad, and the hardships they describe are widely shared across the sport in Egypt.
Debt and despair
A 27-year-old wrestler, who won several gold medals for Egypt and asked not to be named, told Al Jazeera that fellow athletes under 20 years old earn 700 Egyptian pounds ($13.7) to 800 ($15.7) Egyptian pounds a month.
Older international players reportedly receive between 5,000 pounds ($98.2) and 12,000 pounds ($235.7) a month, depending on their achievements.
“Wrestlers often go into debt to cover supplements and living costs while waiting for prize money that may or may not arrive,” he said.
Ahmed Baghdouda left for France in 2023 immediately after winning silver at the African Wrestling Championships, reportedly over low pay. Tarek Abdel Salam defected to Bulgaria in 2017 amid alleged medical neglect and later won European gold under Bulgaria’s flag. That year, Ibrahim Ghanem also chose to stay in France, subsequently winning a World Championship title for the country.
In October 2025, Mohamed Ibrahim el-Sayed – popular as Kishu and a six-time African wrestling champion, two-time U23 world champion, and bronze medallist in the 67kg category at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics – announced he had taken “the first step” towards switching his sporting allegiance to represent the United States, posting training photos from a facility with the US flag behind him.
Asked by Al Jazeera through a messaging app why wrestlers keep fleeing Egypt, Kishu blamed the wrestling federation.
“It’s the only body that can provide a suitable environment, but the opposite keeps happening,” he said from the US. “The problem isn’t just about money – it goes much deeper than that. When I retire, what am I supposed to do? God forbid I get injured – what happens to me then?”
“I would take the same decision again and again and I advise Egypt’s international players to focus on their training and acquire their rights because it’s their lives that are being wasted.”
Al Jazeera reached out to the president and the vice president of the Egyptian Wrestling Federation (EWF), as well as the president of the Egyptian National Olympic Committee (ENOC), for their comments, but none of them responded.
However, the EWF’s team psychologist Hossam Mohamed said the disappearance of players abroad is not simply down to poor financial compensation or neglect, insisting the state provides good support to wrestlers – whether through financial bonuses, training camps abroad, or accommodation and meals. He said medal bonuses can reach 5 million Egyptian pounds ($98,135) for an Olympic gold.
“The wrestling federation, compared to major sports federations, has limited resources in light of the absence of broadcasting rights and the commercial and audience revenues enjoyed by football,” he noted.
“[But the] core problem for [athletes] isn’t only what they receive during their playing years, but what awaits them after retirement or injury.”
On Hajjaj and al-Shami, he said they competed in international championships, but “receiving bonuses is tied to achieving results – a player who doesn’t finish in a top position doesn’t receive a tournament bonus”, and neither was able to achieve podium finishes in recent competitions.
Gamal el-Badrawy, a former head of Egypt’s kickboxing federation, called on the Ministry of Youth and Sports to impose tighter oversight of national sporting federations and to review bonuses, allowances and health insurance.
“[Athletes] cannot be entirely absolved of responsibility, but the weak financial and administrative system is the main driver,” he told Al Jazeera.
Prosecutors investigate
Meanwhile, Egypt’s Ministry of Youth and Sports has referred Hajjaj and al-Shami to the public prosecutor, accusing them of breaking the rules governing national delegations.
The ENOC separately referred Brigadier General Ibrahim Adel – EWF secretary-general and head of the wrestling delegation at the tournament in Taranto – to its ethics committee for investigation and suspended him from his duties for allowing al-Shami to escape.
Adel refused to comment on the criticisms against the EWF, but told Al Jazeera he believed the moves against him were unfair, pointing to precautionary measures already in place before the trip: notarised undertakings signed by both the players’ guardians and the players themselves committing them to return to Egypt.
Meanwhile, fleeing athletes often leave behind distressed families.
Hajjaj’s father, Hajjaj Abu Gabal, told Al Jazeera over the phone that he was deeply worried for his son after he left the national team in Slovakia, noting that he had switched off his phone for a long time and did not respond to calls.
“I signed the notarised parental consent required for my underage son to travel,” he said, as 21 is the age of full legal adulthood in Egypt. “But no one from the wrestling federation had contacted me since the escape.”
Hajjaj, according to his father, said wrestling required expenses for food, drink, clothing and other needs, including costs related to the training period and participation in championships, and these expenses were a burden on him and the family.
“Whatever happens, he’s still my son,” the father said.
“I keep praying for him to be safe and secure, and may God compensate him for the difficult times he went through.”
This article was published in collaboration with Egab, a platform that empowers journalists from across the Global South to publish stories in international media outlets.%!s()
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