Free Ahmed Shihab El-Din , Journalism is not a crime

The news came officially from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, an award-winning Kuwaiti-American journalist of Palestinian origins who posts prolifically on social media, especially on Twitter, where he is known as @ASE, was arrested in Kuwait on March 3, 2026.

"It is understood that authorities have charged him with spreading false information, harming national security, and misusing his mobile phone – vague and overly broad accusations that are routinely used to silence independent journalists," the CPJ statement said, calling on the Kuwaiti government to release him.

In the days before his detention, Shihab-Eldin — who was visiting his family in Kuwait — shared publicly available videos and images related to the US-Israel war on Iran and the Iranian retaliation on Gulf states, just as any respectable professional journalist would do in his place.

Ahmed Shihab El-Din in Doha Film Festival 

On March 2, he shared photos and videos of a US fighter jet that crashed in Kuwait on Substack. 

That video had been geolocated and verified by CNN. None of his posts were photos or videos he took himself.

What makes this case particularly absurd from a legal standpoint is the timing.

Kuwait enacted Law No. 13 of 2026, aimed at safeguarding and protecting the supreme interests of military authorities, on March 15— nearly two weeks after his arrest on March 3.

He was therefore arrested and charged under a law that did not yet exist at the time of his alleged offense.

The law carries prison terms of up to 10 years for spreading false rumours related to military entities with the intent of undermining confidence in them.

CPJ launched a campaign for his release under the hashtag #FreeAhmed with an online petition.

Several international organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch demanded his release.

The story was covered by several Western news outlets. Several US senators and members of Congress raised his case as an American citizen — but as of today, nothing has moved on the Kuwaiti side.

Updated: Most critically — as of yesterday, April 22: his international legal counsel issued an urgent statement saying they were "extremely concerned for Ahmed's safety and wellbeing" in Kuwaiti detention.

His lawyers have filed urgent appeals with United Nations experts and are engaging with US, European, and other authorities.

"It has now been 51 days since our client was taken," said Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, his international counsel. "Every day he's gone is agonizing for his family."

The news of Ahmed Shihab-Eldin’s arrest was not new to me. About a week or two before the CPJ statement, I learned of his arrest through a tweet by one of the activists in the US. I retweeted it and added the hashtag #FreeAhmedShihabEldin.

It felt deeply depressing — because after the release of Alaa Abdelfattah, there was a fleeting thought that we would have a brief rest before going back to the ritual of #FreeX in English, pressing the governments of the Middle East once again.

Within a few hours of my tweet, Ahmed's friends asked me to delete it at the request of his family. I knew that drill very well.

It is a common tactic in the Arab world — when a loved one is detained, and there is hope of quiet release through connections, families prefer to keep things away from the media glare. Going public can sometimes close doors that might otherwise have stayed open.

I was told he was okay, but he could not post anything. Given that he holds US citizenship, there was some hope that the US embassy might quietly secure his release.

That hope is clearly fading now and is actually unrealistic when I think about it.

Ahmed's arrest comes at a particularly dark moment — not only for Kuwait, but for human rights across the Gulf region and, increasingly, within the United States itself.

I am genuinely afraid that the Trump administration will have little interest in defending an American of Arab origin, a Muslim, non-Zionist, pro-Palestinian progressive journalist. 

Ahmed represents almost every identity that this administration has shown open hostility toward. He is not the profile of an American citizen that this White House will go to the mat for.

His detention is unfolding against the backdrop of what can only be described as a human rights catastrophe in Kuwait.

The mass revocation of citizenship — already one of the largest such campaigns since World War II — has accelerated sharply since the war began.

As of April 15, 2026, over 71,000 cases have been officially recorded in the Government Gazette since the campaign intensified in late 2024.

But that number alone does not capture the true scale of what is happening.

Because revocations routinely extend to wives, children, and grandchildren of the named individual, independent analysts and academic sources estimate that between 250,000 and 300,000 people have been affected in total — potentially bringing the real figure to nearly one in five of Kuwait's entire citizen population.

While the UN has not issued a single headline condemnation, human rights bodies have consistently pointed out that these actions likely violate Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that "no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality."

Kuwait recently enacted Decree-Law No. 52/2026, published in the Official Gazette and immediately effective. It fundamentally rewrites the citizenship framework — foreign spouses no longer automatically acquire citizenship, children of naturalized parents are classified as naturalized in perpetuity, and the Minister of Interior gains dramatically expanded authority over all nationality decisions.

DNA testing and biometric identification are now legally authorized tools for citizenship investigations. The state can literally demand your DNA to prove you belong.

Most troublingly, the new law redefines Kuwaiti citizenship by origin as applying only to individuals whose ancestors resided in Kuwait before 1920 and remained until December 1959.

Given the historically fluid and transient nature of borders between Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran a century ago — when tribes moved freely across land that had no modern boundaries — many natural-born Kuwaitis have effectively become stateless overnight under this definition.

This is precisely what makes Ahmed Shihab-Eldin's situation so alarming. His Palestinian origins place his family squarely among those that the current campaign seems to be targeting — although families like his did not simply arrive in Kuwait, they helped build it.

His grandfather, Ahmad Hassan Shihab-Eldin, was a Palestinian educator born in Jaffa in 1912. He arrived in Kuwait in 1936 as part of the first Palestinian educational mission, personally invited by Sheikh Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, at a time when Kuwait was just beginning to construct its modern educational foundations from the ground up.

He was appointed teacher and first headmaster of Al-Mubarakiya School — the oldest school in Kuwait — and went on to serve as General Inspector of Kuwaiti Schools and Director of Education from 1936 to 1942.

During those foundational years, he helped establish the Scout movement in Kuwait, co-authored the Education Law of 1937, and was instrumental in opening the first schools for girls in the country. In recognition of a lifetime of service to the nation he had helped build, he was granted Kuwaiti citizenship in 1961.

And then there is the father. Dr. Adnan Shihab-Eldin is a Kuwaiti physicist and nuclear engineer who earned his BSc, MSc, and PhD — all from UC Berkeley, as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate. He went on to conduct research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Harvard, and CERN, before dedicating decades to building Kuwait's scientific institutions as Director General of its Institute for Scientific Research and Vice Rector of Kuwait University.

He then represented Kuwait and the Arab world on the highest international stages — Acting Secretary General of OPEC, senior director at both the IAEA and UNESCO, and Director General of the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences for fourteen years.

This is who Ahmed Shihab-Eldin comes from. I won't speak about his acomplishments as award-winning jouralist, probably , he is from the most well known Kuwaiti journalists worldwide now.

A grandfather who built Kuwait's schools. A father decorated by France and Italy. And yet their son and grandson sits in a Kuwaiti detention cell — arrested for sharing a video that CNN had already verified and published to the world.

Kuwait was once among the rare constitutional monarchies in the Arab world that maintained a genuinely functioning parliament — imperfect, constrained, but real.

That distinction came to a depressing end with the rise of the new Emir, Sheikh Mishal, and the authoritarian turn his rule has taken.

Since Sheikh Mishal came to power in late 2023, Kuwait has suspended parliament, shelved key constitutional articles, and unleashed a sweeping citizenship revocation campaign that has no precedent in the country's modern history.

Legislation passed in December 2024 went further still, stating that citizenship could be removed for reasons including criticism of the emir or religious figures — effectively criminalizing dissent by decree.

The emir's own words require no commentary. After revocations surpassed 50,000, he gave a public address praying for God's assistance in "returning Kuwait to its native people, clean and free of the impurities that have clung to it." The language of purification. The language of ethnic and national cleansing, dressed in the vocabulary of piety.

And yet there have been no Western condemnations of any substance — no statements, no sanctions, no outrage — while thousands of people lose their nationality overnight. One cannot help but ask the obvious question: if scenes like these were unfolding in Iran or Russia, how many emergency press conferences would have already been held?

Anyhow , please sign the CPJ petition and demand #FreeAhmed. Spread the petition and pray for his safety above all.