Nigerian Afro-pop sensation Yemi Alade has history with the Grammys. She’s featured on a Grammy-nominated album by Beyoncé and a Grammy-winning one by Beninese-French star Angelique Kidjo; but despite her popularity in Africa and her multilingual songs, Alade has yet to win a solo Grammy.

On February 2, that could change, with her song “Tomorrow” nominated in the Best African Music Performance category.

“Tomorrow” features on Alade’s sixth studio album “Rebel Queen,” which the Recording Academy said “solidifies her reputation as “Mama Africa” — the title of a previous Alade album and a term associated with iconic South African singer Miriam Makeba.

Alade first found fame with her 2014 single “Johnny,” which in 2019 made her the first Nigerian female artist to hit 100 million views on YouTube. She has also recorded the song in Portuguese, Swahili, and French.

She was inspired to record the French version by hearing her francophone African fans singing it word for word at her shows and thought that would show them her appreciation. As she began to tour Europe, she recalls the song became one of the pillars of her career.

“My own superwoman”

Alade was born in Abia State, southeastern Nigeria, to a Yoruba father and an Igbo mother, and historically, “intertribal relationships were frowned on,” she explained. As a teen growing up in Lagos, she and her friends were also immersed in African American culture listening to rap music and making mix tapes. That context played a key role in Alade’s development as an artist and intentionality became paramount, from her lyrics to her album titles.

“King of Queens,” “Woman of Steel,” “Mama Africa,” “Empress”, and “Rebel Queen” all speak of her struggles as a female artist in the industry, women’s empowerment and the unification of Africans across the world.

“I needed to be my own superwoman. I think that spirit became what you see today,” she said.

Rebel Queen mixes genres like R&B and pop with dancehall, highlife, and amapiano, with Alade singing in English, French, Igbo, Yoruba, and Swahili. It is the climax of a decade-long musical career that has taken her on a rich cultural journey.

“My love for Africa just genuinely grows,” she said. “I do not do this with an agenda. When I travel, I see the different cultures, I easily accept it, appreciate it, from the food to the language to the way of life. In every country I go to there’s something that’s culturally appealing.”

Staying independent

Alade has become known as a champion of African culture and for her international collaborations. She featured in Beyoncé’s 2020 musical film and visual album “Black is King,” and on her song “Don’t Be Jealous” from the album “The Lion King: The Gift.”

New album “Rebel Queen” features Ziggy Marley on the song “Peace and Love” and Kidjo on “African Woman.” The latter, Alade says, was one of the most challenging and fulfilling songs to make because she got to know one of her heroes even better, describing Kidjo as “my musical mother.”

Despite her growing success, Alade has chosen to remain independent, working with the same management team for over a decade in the music industry and recording with Effyzzie Music Group, rather than a major label.

“Other labels have made offers and we haven’t accepted, not because they’re not good enough. (But) if your goals are not in alignment with the goals that I’ve set for myself for over 10 years, then we should not be in the same boat. If you have a team of two people, trust me, that’s all you need,” she added.

A key group of Arab nations have said they “firmly” reject any efforts to resettle or evict Palestinians from Gaza, after US President Donald Trump said he wanted to “clean out” the enclave and move its population to neighboring countries.

The foreign ministers of Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt issued a wide-ranging statement Saturday, saying they hoped to work with Trump on a two-state solution in the Middle East.

But they pushed back on Trump’s suggestion to relocate Palestinians from Gaza. Without specifically referencing the president’s proposal, the ministers reiterated a commitment to rebuilding the enclave while ensuring “the continued presence of Palestinians in their homeland.”

The nations “firmly rejected any actions that threaten these rights, including settlement expansion, forced evictions, home demolitions, land annexation, or the displacement of Palestinians through direct expulsion or coerced migration,” they wrote after a meeting of the foreign ministers in Cairo.

In January, Trump said he had spoken with the king of Jordan about potentially building housing elsewhere in the Middle East and moving more than 1 million Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring countries.

“I said to him that I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”

“I don’t know, something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now,” Trump said. “Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.”

The statement from the Arab foreign ministers touched on a range of topics relating to Gaza’s reconstruction, as the fragile ceasefire between Hamas and Israel allows the region to assess the impact of a brutal 15-month conflict.

The group hailed “the important role played by the United States in facilitating the deal,” for which both Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden have sought credit.

They also “called for the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and rejected any attempts to partition the Strip,” and pointed to the “indispensable role” of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees or UNRWA, two days after Israel’s ban on the agency went into effect.

A Norwegian-owned, Russian-crewed ship that authorities initially suspected of involvement in damage to an underwater fiber optic cable connecting Latvia and the Swedish island of Gotland has been released.

Norwegian police said late Friday that no findings had been made that would have linked the ship, the Silver Dania, “to the act.”

“Tromsø police district has now conducted a number of investigative steps and secured what we see as necessary, considering the request from Latvia. The investigation will continue, but we see no reason for the ship to remain in Tromsø any longer,” Tromsø police attorney Ronny Jørgensen said late Friday.

The Silver Dania was stopped on Thursday evening and brought into the port of Tromsø in northern Norway on Friday morning by a Norwegian coast guard vessel for inspection. They said that followed a request from Latvian authorities and a ruling by a Norwegian court.

Police at the time said there was suspicion that the ship, which was sailing between the Russian ports of St. Petersburg and Murmansk when it was detained, had been involved in serious cable damage that was discovered last weekend in the Baltic Sea.

The authorities didn’t elaborate, but said they were searching the ship and conducting interviews.

Tormod Fossmark, CEO of the SilverSea company, which owns the ship, denied that the vessel caused any damage when it sailed through the area of the cable and said the company was cooperating with authorities on what it considered a “serious” matter.

“We have no involvement in this whatsoever,” Fossmark told The Associated Press. “We did not have any anchors out or do anything, so that will be confirmed today” in the investigation, he said.

He stressed that she ship’s tracking data shows no irregularities in its journey.

Fossmark said he hoped the vessel, which wasn’t carrying any cargo, would be able to sail onward later in the day.

Damage to the data transmission cable running from Ventspils, Latvia, to Gotland was detected Sunday. Later that day, Swedish prosecutors announced that they had opened a preliminary investigation into suspected sabotage and ordered the detention of a vessel suspected of damaging the cable, the Malta-flagged Vezhen.

That ship’s Bulgarian owner said that it was possible that the Vezhen had accidentally caused a cable to break but dismissed any possibility of sabotage or any other action on the part of the crew.

On the first day of November, Aleksandar Matkovic was running late for a train. He was traveling from Novi Sad, in the north of Serbia, to its capital Belgrade, where he works as an economic historian. When he got to the station, he witnessed a scene of horror that has rocked the country to this day.

Minutes before he arrived, the canopy of the station – where reconstruction had been completed months earlier – had collapsed, crushing passengers waiting on the platform. Fifteen people were killed.

Shock soon turned to anger. The crumbled canopy has come to serve as a potent symbol of what many Serbs see as corruption at the heart of the state, sculpted by President Aleksandar Vucic and his government over 12 years in power. What began as vigils for the dead have become near-daily protests, drawing in ever-larger segments of Serbian society and reaching every corner of the Balkan nation. “We’re in uncharted territory,” said Matkovic.

The student-led demonstrations, demanding the full release of documents about the reconstruction works, have become so large and so lasting that some have questioned whether they could bring down Vucic’s reign. “All sorts of questions are going through people’s minds,” said Matkovic.

Vucic has dominated Serbia since coming to power as prime minister in 2014, then president three years later. A former information minister for the brutal Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian democracy has degraded under Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Freedom House, which measures the strength of democracies, said Serbia declined from “free” to “party free” in 2019, citing attacks on the media and concentration of power in the hands of the president.

His regime is hard to categorize, analysts say. It is not as repressive as Aleksander Lukashenko’s Belarus, but neither as permissive as Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Ivana Stradner, a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Vucic has “made Serbia what Russia was like in the early 1990s, leaning towards a criminal, corrupt state with no rule of law.”

Still, his detractors praise him as a canny operator. In an increasingly multipolar world, countries such as Serbia – a regional powerhouse that the West has tried to prize away from its historic ally Russia – enjoy plenty of options. For Moscow, Serbia can stem the westward slide of other Balkan nations. For Europe, a huge proposed lithium mine could make it important for the green transition. For China, Serbia offers the chance to extend its influence through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Even some in the United States have interests in the country. Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is reportedly working on a deal to build a Trump-branded hotel in Belgrade, with capital from various Gulf states.

For Serbia, this transactional approach may not add up to a coherent ideology – it has sold weapons to Ukraine but refuses to join sanctions against Russia – but it has been profitable. Serbia has been kept plied with Russian gas, Chinese infrastructure, European investment, and even glitzy American construction projects.

Turning point

This “strategic ambiguity,” as Stradner calls it, has come at the cost of domestic discontent, however.

“People have had enough,” said Engjellushe Morina, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The students are fed up with this rhetoric … where Vucic says one thing for internal consumption and another thing for international consumption.”

Anger with the government had been brewing for years. In May 2023, when Serbia was rocked by two mass shootings, people protested the country’s “culture of violence.” There were more demonstrations after a disputed election later that year, with the opposition calling for a rerun. They also lasted for weeks but eventually fizzled out.

This time is different, protesters and analysts say. Latent discontent with the government found its expression in the Novi Sad station tragedy. The station had been hastily reopened in 2022 – with Vucic and Orban in attendance – ahead of an election held that year, before being closed for more works by a Chinese company and its subcontractors. Matkovic said Serbs felt the project was “fast tracked” and “pushed by political elites.” It reopened in July 2024, just four months before its newly built canopy collapsed.

While previous scandals have failed to stick to Vucic, this one has. The perception of alleged corruption is “one thing that unifies all people,” said Stradner.

Serbian prosecutors have so far indicted 13 people for their role in the disaster, including the former minister for construction, transport and infrastructure, but protesters have demanded that more be done to hold people politically and criminally accountable.

‘The fear factor is gone’

Analysts say Vucic is skilled in thwarting protests by making targeted concessions, jettisoning allies, catching the opposition off-guard or ridiculing the movement. He regularly labels protesters as “foreign agents” attempting to stage a “color revolution,” as in other former Soviet states.

But these demonstrations represent a new challenge. Because they began as acts of mourning, they were largely free of “political” signs such as European Union flags, which Vucic has previously used to discredit demonstrations.

The protests have also drawn in broad swaths of Serbian society. In scenes reminiscent of the end of Milosevic’s regime, farmers have joined in, driving their tractors into Belgrade.

Even judges have come on board – a shock, given Vucic’s control of much of the judiciary, said Edward P. Joseph, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University who served for a dozen years in the Balkans, including with NATO.

It is not clear how Vucic can reclaim that power, Joseph said. Because Vucic must “play this charade” of responsibility, a violent crackdown would be “writing his own epitaph.”

But the opposite approach – embarking on large-scale democratic reforms – is also challenging, said Morina. Although Prime Minister Milos Vucevic resigned this week, saying he did so “in order not to further raise tensions in society,” this has done little to satisfy the protesters.

“How convincing is it that he (Vucic) is going to be able to turn this whole movement that he has built – the SNS (the Serbian Progressive Party), the party supporters, the radicals, the football hooligans – how can he turn this into a democratic movement?” Morina said.

It is not clear what can break the deadlock. The protest movement has distanced itself from opposition politicians, meaning there is no obvious alternative waiting in the wings. But this could be a strength, Stradner said.

“It’s time to stop having a cult of personality that Serbia has had for decades. It’s time to believe more in laws, in the judiciary, in checks and balances, than to believe in one personality type,” she said.

Could a ceasefire deal be a disaster for Ukraine in disguise?

That is the urgent question echoing in Ukrainian frontline bunkers and in the ruins of besieged towns, where ubiquitous exhaustion begs for peace, but where a costly learned distrust of Russia rules.

Anxiety is manifold. Would a ceasefire hold? Would Russia just use it to re-equip and attack again? Would Moscow even want it, given it is fast winning ground? Would Ukraine’s allies give it the same military support, if they felt diplomacy had led the guns to fall silent?

The screens before Volodymyr Sablyn, a battalion commander in the 66th mechanized brigade, tell a gut-wrenching story of Ukraine’s modern, yet archaically brutal battlefield. Tiny, cheap drones fly over the pockmarked and battered trenches around Lyman – a mix of frozen sludge, trash, bunkers and “beetroot,” the ugly term for human remains that cannot be retrieved.

Sablyn joined the army in February 2015, when Russian separatists took the Donetsk town of Debaltseve despite agreeing to a truce. Now, across the eastern front, ceasefires called a decade ago that provided little but cover for further Russian military advances are living proof of the urgent need for caution at the negotiating table.

The scene Sablyn commands is one where relentless Russian assaults and tolerance of casualties has exploited Kyiv’s key weakness: a lack of infantry. As Sablyn’s forces drop mortars on Lyman’s frontlines, Moscow’s forces are advancing on a vital military hub to his south – Pokrovsk. The pace of its encirclement is startling and, once it falls, Russia will have few major settlements between its forces and the major cities of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia.

Hope is a key currency here, and one facet of it, consistently raised by Ukrainian officials, is the idea of European or NATO troops providing security guarantees to Kyiv through their specific presence in frontline areas – as peacekeepers of sorts.

“If NATO could send troops to Ukraine,” said Sablyn, “it would be a guarantee of security in Ukraine. Because Russia – no matter how much they say that they are not afraid of anyone – are afraid of America, are afraid of NATO as a whole.”

Yet as dusk settles near the 66th’s forward artillery units, the idea seems beset with insurmountable risk. The threat of Russian drones is so acute, artillery units can be reached when the sun tips into the horizon, and the light is vanishing.

A unit commander who escorts us checks his handheld monitor to see if the Russian surveillance drones have left. We pause for 10 minutes until the all-clear is given and then race across the rocky fields to a tree-line where aging artillery guns deal regular “suppressing fire” to the Russians.

Peace is something here you better be deadly serious about, and the men who live underground are skeptical about.

“There is only a 30% chance of a ceasefire,” said one soldier, Viktor. “Because the situation on the front is not in such a way that we can see that there will be a truce. It’s all very difficult.”

Another, Andriy, added: “I think it’s 40%. The other side is winning, taking territories. And we, by and large, have nothing to say.”

The growing candor of troops who would months ago repeat only studied assurances of victory is replicated by some exhausted civilians from frontline towns.

Slowly trudging through the ravaged streets of Lyman is Larissa, 72, her gold incisors bright among the shell-peppered concrete.

She becomes tearful when asked why she has not left a town first taken in the Russian invasion of 2022, then liberated by Ukrainian forces later that year, and now heavily pressured by Putin’s men again, who are about 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) from its outskirts.

“Here, I ran barefoot; there, I swam in the river,” she said, gesturing to the town’s edges. I am 72, I don’t want to (leave). All my three brothers are buried here, all my aunts, uncles, dad, mum. I can’t leave.”

She has scant sympathy for Kyiv, describing the Ukrainian soldiers she meets in supermarkets as unkempt, and saying a friend’s family of seven left Lyman two weeks earlier and were housed in a stable in nearby Poltava. “A stable! But it was clean and there was some hay.”

Larissa said Trump will be no different to Biden, who she had heard on television tried to buy parts of eastern Ukraine for his son, likely echoing false Russian propaganda. Her hopes are with the Kremlin as the decision-makers.

“Nobody’s going to solve this. Only Putin will if he says, ‘that’s enough, I’ve already killed so many people.’” She nods when asked if peace through Putin is the only path ahead.

Behind her, a bus collects locals who still shuffle in and out of the desolate town to go shopping. None will talk except the driver, Dima, who says he went to Russia when the Russians first invaded to stay with relatives and recently came back. He says he is used to the destruction and hopeful for peace. “It’s all politics. Nothing depends on us. As it is decided, so it will be.”

For others, there has been a decade of turmoil and loss.

Inesa, 60, sits alone in the central square of Slovyansk, where 10 years ago Russian proxy separatists seized the local administration building and fought off the Ukrainian army, over repeated ceasefires, deals and Russian advances.

She said a decade earlier, despite the chaos of separatism, they still had jobs and hope. Now she and her mother are all that remains in Slovyansk, a key Russian target in Donetsk, the rest of her family scattered, she said, across the world by war.

“Now there is no future,” she said. “We don’t see it. Who does? I want it just to stop. Stop the bombing.”

Millions dined in their restaurants worldwide, getting a taste of Malaysia supplied by a sprawling conglomerate that claimed to embrace Islamic values by caring for thousands of disadvantaged children they said were orphans in homes across the country.

But the leaders of Global Ikhwan Services and Business Holdings (GISBH) are now fighting allegations they ran a cult-like organization that forced followers to work and have many children, some allegedly conceived through rape, to populate orphanages and raise donations that funded their lavish lifestyles.

When Malaysian police raided two dozen homes run by the company in mid-September, they rescued over 600 children and have since detained hundreds of people, charging some with crimes including child trafficking, sexual abuse and organized crime. GISBH lawyer Rosli Kamaruddin says the group’s leaders plan to fight the charges.

This is the story of the cult’s apparent revival – complete with its own prison islands and “holy water” infused with the leaders’ hair and bathwater that former members say was sprayed on goods produced in their factories and on meals served to diners at their restaurants.

A nation in shock

Royal Malaysia Police launched a series of raids in September on dozens of care homes operated by GISBH, and over several weeks rescued hundreds of children they say were the offspring of company employees.

In one press briefing, Police Inspector General Razarudin Husain told reporters children were groomed, malnourished and subject to “child labor, exploitation.” Health screenings conducted on 392 children found all had suffered physical or emotional abuse.

“They themselves were abused by their caretakers. Then they were forced to sodomize other children,” Husain told another press briefing.

As the raids unraveled, GISBH restaurants, grocery stores and laundromats were closed, blinds drawn, logos stripped off the walls and social media accounts shut down. Some of the groups’ members fled back to their hometowns across Malaysia and were waiting instructions from the group’s leaders as to what to do next, their families said.

In raids on houses affiliated with GISBH leadership, police found dozens of books and photographs associated with Ashaari Muhammad, the founder of Al Arqam. Some had been buried in a riverbed, their pages caked in mud.

Al Arqam was an Islamic group, led by Ashaari, known as “Abuya” or Father to his followers, that believed in building a self-sufficient Islamic community with Malaysia at the center of the Muslim world.

It was banned by the Malaysian government in 1994 for “deviant” teachings, a decision that at the time was questioned by international rights groups as a potential breach of religious freedom. Ashaari subsequently spent 10 years under house arrest and died in 2010.

GISBH’s promotional material says the company was founded by Ashaari “with the aim to develop the Islamic way of life in all aspects of life such as education, arts and culture, animal farming.” Before the raids, GISBH had about 100 care homes housing many of the 3,000 “youths” the group claimed to be their “employees,” according to former members and information from the company’s website.

Those arrested include GISBH CEO Nasiruddin Mohd Ali who admitted in a video statement that “one or two cases of sodomy” occurred, but he rejected all other allegations made against the group as slander.

“I am not trying to blame the law. Indeed, we have done some wrong in the eyes of the law […] Indeed, there were one or two cases of sodomy, but why lump them all together?” he said.

Nasiruddin, alongside other GISBH leadership, has since been charged with belonging to an organized crime group and is currently awaiting trial. Among those also charged is Mohammad Adib At-Tarmimi, the son of Ashaari.

The highly publicized case shocked the nation. While most Malaysians had heard about Abuya and Al Arqam back in the 90s, few knew about their connection to GISBH and the alleged abuses that went on inside the company. But it came as no surprise to anyone who had ever worked for GISBH.

Scabies, stitches and secrets

Farid, who recently left GISBH, was 27 when he joined the group in 2010 after years of struggling with drug addiction. “I give my soul, I give myself to them because they want to fix me,” said Farid, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his family.

He was in an arranged marriage with the daughter of a senior member and quickly had two daughters. When their older daughter turned two, she was sent to live in a charity home, like most GISBH children.

At first glance, some of the welfare homes bear no association to GISBH. Some carried the GISBH logo, others appeared to be normal houses with yards strewn with toys on quiet suburban streets. Facebook pages run by the homes show small children said to be orphans in religious garb, singing and praying, imploring followers to donate or give zakat to buy food, clothes or school supplies. Zakat is a form of religious alms giving and one of the five mandatory pillars of Islam.

But the children were not orphans. In most cases their parents were GISBH workers, like Farid, though some hadn’t seen their kids in years. Instead, they were raised by caretakers who in some cases were only a few years older than them, according to former members and law enforcement.

Over time many of the children came to believe they actually were orphans, he added, while authorities said some couldn’t identify their parents.

Farid says his daughter quickly changed after moving into a welfare home. “My daughter was a cheerful girl, always smiling, always laughing but when she went there, she was very sad, she had no self-confidence,” he said.

Amir, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his family, said caretakers told him the boy was often crying and wetting his pants. One time he visited, his son had stitches on his chin and forehead.

Amir said a caretaker had admitted throwing the boy in anger after he wet himself. The boy also told his father he was locked in a dog kennel as punishment.

“They asked me to keep the matter a secret,” Amir said, but he said almost everyone at the group knew about other instances of abuse that went on in the care homes. If their child hadn’t been hurt, they knew somebody whose kid had been, he said.

Total control

The group’s headquarters was a sprawling compound complete with horse stables in the town of Rawang, a 30-minute drive from the capital Kuala Lumpur. One local resident recalled that the arrival of the Al Arqam-linked community in the early 2000s drew attention from locals, but there was an “unspoken boundary” between the group and the rest of the town’s residents.

Life inside the community was tightly controlled.

“GISBH embodies the criteria of a cult – absolute loyalty to leaders, charismatic leader at the core of the movement; exclusive membership and severe penalty for leaving, members’ loss of personal autonomy,” said Dr Azmil Tayeb, a political scientist and Associate Professor at Universiti Sains Malaysia, who specializes in Islamic political and social movements.

Men and women, even married couples, lived in gender segregated dorms and were not allowed to meet without the leaders’ approval, former members said.

Even if you saw your wife in the courtyard you couldn’t speak to her, Farid recalled. Instead, married couples had to apply for what were essentially conjugal visits, scheduled appointments where couples were expected to have sex, several former members said. Viagra was provided and in some cases group leaders demanded to know the details the next morning, said Farid.

“I saw myself as a sex slave, I didn’t see myself as a wife,” said Zoey, a former member from Singapore, who left the group in 2021 and asked to use a pseudonym to protect her young children. “The role as a woman in GISB is only for you to give birth.”

Zoey’s family joined GISBH when she was a teenager, and she struggled to adapt to the restrictive culture of the group. At the age of 17, she was deemed “uncontrollable” by the leadership and married to a man 10 years her senior. Within weeks of being married, her husband became physically and sexually abusive towards her, she said. He regularly raped her, she said.

Zoey said she tried to go on birth control pills but when her husband found out, she was beaten again and forced to stop. Her complaints to the group elders went unheard, she said. Instead, she was told to obey her husband as “he is your heaven.”

Zoey fled the marriage and now cares for their nine children in Singapore – the eldest nearly the age she was when she was forced to marry.

‘Superbikes for Islam’

In 2022, the group claimed to have more than 5,000 employees working in restaurants, bakeries, factories and supermarkets and other businesses in 20 countries including Australia, UK, France, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, where they also ran a resort, according to their website and news reports.

The company’s unsettling practices allegedly extended to the food factories where workers sprayed so-called “holy water” on products sold to the public, according to several former members.

“Holy water” or “Air Berkat” was a concoction made by mixing the leaders’ saliva, body hair and bathwater. Members of the group believed that each part of their leaders’ bodies contained “berkat” or spiritual-magical properties.

“They’ve always been well connected; we are not talking about an isolated cult in the middle of the jungle,” said Tayeb.

GISBH’s connections to the government reached the highest level of Malaysia’s elites. In April 2023, the executive chairman of the group and several other senior leaders met with Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim at his private office.

At the meeting, the Prime Minister “promised to help all efforts of GISBH in the name of the Muslim economy,” according to an article posted on Ikhwan News, the group’s own media publication. Following the raids in September, Anwar urged police and religious authorities to investigate and take appropriate action to address misconduct at the company.

While some employees worked 16-hour shifts in factories, restaurants and resorts GISBH leadership spent their time jetting around the world, meeting the highest rungs of Malaysian leadership and attending sporting events, with Nasiruddin taking a special interest in horseback riding and motorsports.

Followers were told not to question the leaders’ lavish spending for it was all done in the name of Islam, one former member said. “They say we buy superbikes for Islam,” said the former member, who wished to remain anonymous.

Anyone who asked questions or dissented was sent to “quarantine,” faraway camps where members spent months living in jungle huts with no water or electricity, repenting their sins, said several former members, recalling their experience.

As one former member put it, “You ask today, tomorrow they send you to the quarantine island.”

Amir said he spent 10 months in quarantine on Tioman Island, a nature reserve popular with tourists off the main coast of Malaysia. He said he was sent there as punishment for trying to escape after learning about his son’s abuse.

Nowhere to go

Since the raids in September, most of the children have returned to the care of their parents, but over 100 children are yet to be claimed by their families, authorities said.

“My children don’t love or respect me anymore. They have been brainwashed,” the lawyer recalls one of his clients telling him.

The years of indoctrination will take some time to undo. After attending reeducation programs, the GISBH children will eventually be introduced to mainstream schools, according to Malaysia’s education ministry. There, they will for the first time become a part of Malaysian society.

For the adults not facing charges, the future is unclear. Those who grew up inside the group have few life skills to fall back on, and many of the men have multiple wives and many children they now need to support.

“They say if you are in the group, you are on the highway to Heaven,” Farid said. Outside, Zoey said, former members “have nowhere to go.”

On January 9 GISBH posted a message on their Facebook page after months of silence.

“Some people are created to be a test to other people,” it read. “So be patient with all this.”