Iran’s most powerful, revered, and feared military commander long said he dreamed of being a martyr for the “resistance.” And in the early hours Friday morning that wish was fulfilled, when an armed American drone assassinated Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.

U.S. officials portrayed the targeted killing as a “preemptive” action against the chief of Iran’s elite Qods Force and the leader of the Iraqi Shiite Kata’ib Hezbollah militia traveling with him. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said they were planning an imminent attack that he asserted would have cost “dozens or hundreds of American lives.”

Yet rather than acting as a deterrent, the U.S. strike is being seen in Iran as an acute escalation that amounts to a declaration of war and requires a military response.

It is the latest in a series of events to raise tensions in Iraq in the past week – including the killing of an American contractor on an Iraqi base, a U.S. retaliatory strike that killed at least two dozen members of the Iran-backed Kata’ib Hezbollah, and, in turn, an attack led by that militia on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Together, they have brought the smoldering U.S.-Iran standoff to a new level of violence, and could trigger a much broader and more lethal direct conflict.

President Donald Trump tweeted a picture of an American flag shortly after the United States claimed responsibility for the drone strike. He later tweeted that General Soleimani “killed or badly wounded thousands of Americans” and “should have been taken out many years ago.”

But many are raising questions about the administration’s calculations in killing one of Iran’s most popular and iconic symbols of resistance. Despite ample opportunities, past American presidents and Israeli commanders had refrained from taking him out amid the high risk and uncertain consequences of global retaliation by Iran and its loyal proxies.

As tensions flare, questions are also being raised about the apparent disconnect between policymakers in Washington and the realities in Iraq and Iran where, analysts say, American boasting about the assassination of General Soleimani is likely to energize and motivate Iranian-led retaliation.

“The irony here is that an action that was supposed to deter additional Iranian attacks in the region is now bound to do the exact opposite,” says Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group.

“President Trump has helped to consolidate the most hard-line elements within the Islamic Republic,” says Mr. Vaez, contacted in Oman.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “is averse to demonstrating weakness, and if Iran fails to respond, that’s how it’s going to be interpreted in Washington, and would invite additional U.S. attacks,” says Mr. Vaez. “Iran has developed this network of proxies and partners throughout the region precisely for this moment.”

U.S.-Iraq ties at risk

The assassination has also jeopardized U.S. ties to Iraq, and galvanized calls for the expulsion of more than 5,000 American troops deployed there. Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi called the killing “a dangerous escalation” that will ignite a “devastating war in Iraq, the region and the world.”

“This is just the beginning,” says an Iraqi official in Baghdad who asked not to be named. “So far you’ve had a few bits of glass broken [at the U.S. Embassy] ... a few walls that were spray-painted. There’s much more to come.”

“I personally believe that the United States misread the situation,” says the official. “They are able to tell their audience back home that, ‘We got the guys that have been targeting us, and we were able to respond strongly.’”

But the American troops in Iraq, adds the official, are “low-hanging fruit,” and vulnerable to attack by Iran and its Shiite militia allies. Indeed, Iranian commanders have warned for decades that they would respond to any American attack by targeting U.S. forces ringing the region, from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan.

In Washington, the Pentagon announced Friday that the U.S. was sending 3,500 more American troops to the Middle East.

Iran reacted with fury over the death of General Soleimani, who has masterminded an unprecedented expansion of Iranian influence in the past decade, as the Qods Force – the elite branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that handles operations abroad – marshaled Shiite militia forces from Lebanon to Syria and Iraq to Yemen, to battle Iran’s enemies.

Ayatollah Khamenei on Friday praised General Soleimani’s “lofty status” as a martyr and warned in a tweet that “#SevereRevenge awaits the criminals who have stained their hands” with General Soleimani’s blood.

“The Americans have been scrambling for a time not knowing what to do, but basically watching as those they consider to be their biggest enemies gain more and more influence over the Iraqi state,” says Renad Mansour, an Iraq expert at the Chatham House think tank in London.

“This for them was to perhaps reassert its dominance with air power. But obviously the backlash would lead one to believe it wasn’t a wise move,” says Mr. Mansour.

“It seems some of the more political parts of the American political establishment – the National Security Council, the White House – got a bit excited about all the anti-Iran sentiment coming out of Iraq.”

Media campaign in Iran

Unique among Iranian commanders, General Soleimani – who cut his teeth as a military leader during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s – was the subject of a media campaign devoted to showing him in charge on the front lines against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria.

General Soleimani and the Shiite militias he helped to create in Iraq are often credited with swiftly intervening to save Baghdad in mid-2014, when ISIS swept across Iraq. But the continued influence and corruption of those Iran-backed militias – and the role of General Soleimani himself, who brokered the deal that created Iraq’s current government – have in recent months raised anti-Iranian sentiment among Iraqi protesters demanding political reforms.

Iraqi protesters have also bristled at reports that the Iranian general helped orchestrate the tough crackdown and use of snipers against Iraqi protesters that took more than 500 lives.

In response, Iranian consulates in the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala have been attacked and burned multiple times, and the offices of pro-Iranian militias and their political parties torched.

But analysts say the retaliatory U.S. airstrikes on bases of the Iran-backed Kata’ib Hezbollah on Dec. 29, following the death of the contractor and several rocket attacks by Shiite militias, were seen by many in Iraq as disproportionate, resulting in the breach of the American Embassy and providing evidence of a lack of U.S. political awareness in Iraq.

For example, a senior State Department official, when asked by a journalist about the possible consequences of the missile strikes, said, “We don’t have any fears in this regard.” Yet within hours, the Baghdad embassy was subject to an unprecedented attack, during which U.S. diplomats were in hiding for nearly two days and the walls were daubed with pro-Soleimani slogans.

Iran “set a trap”

“It is another example of U.S. foreign policy being disoriented, as it has always been, regarding Iraq,” says Abbas Kadhim, director of the Iraq Initiative at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.

Iran or their allies in Iraq, he says, “set a trap” for the U.S. by killing the American contractor, which elicited the missile strike on the Shiite militia – and fanned anti-American sentiment.

“Strategically, this is exactly giving the provocateurs what they wanted, which is turning the United States from an ally that helps Iraq fight its enemies, into a force that is bombing Iraqis,” says Mr. Kadhim.

The result simply tapped into the fact that Iraqis today often reject all foreign influence, American as well as Iranian.

“We have a lot of people [in Washington] who are thinking in jingoistic terms, which is completely detached from the reality on the ground in Iraq,” says Mr. Kadhim. “It’s very popular in Washington to give a narrative that, ‘Oh, we are loved in Iraq,’ and, ‘How dare you say that the Iraqis don’t like us to be there, and we are better than the Iranians.’ This is just nonsense.”

The result is that the death of General Soleimani – the man who has garnered the highest approval ratings in Iran, with polls showing that 2 out of 3 Iranians held a favorable opinion of him – will have an impact, if not on Iran’s ability to exact revenge.

“Without any doubt, it’s a severe blow to the Qods Force, but it’s certainly not a fatal one,” says Mr. Vaez of the International Crisis Group. Iran immediately named General Soleimani’s longtime deputy, Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani, as the new Qods Force chief.

General Ghaani “might not have the same strategic vision or tactical skills,” says Mr. Vaez. “But the entire network that Soleimani has already laid throughout the region is for sure going to remain functional and will pose a threat to U.S. interests.”

Vahid Salemi/AP

A boy carries a portrait of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in the U.S. airstrike in Iraq, in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 3, 2020.

Two presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, weighed the option of taking out one of Iran’s most prominent and revered military leaders, Qassem Soleimani, commanding general of the Qods Force, a powerful branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In the end both presidents held back, worried that potential consequences – including a further destabilized Middle East, deeper U.S. military involvement in the region, and even all-out war with Iran – outweighed the satisfaction of removing a figure with American soldiers’ blood on his hands.

Now President Donald Trump has taken the very step Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush thought better of, with the early Friday drone strike that killed General Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq.

Mr. Trump took to Twitter Friday morning to laud what amounts to the most significant and potentially consequential military action of his presidency.

For much of his time in office, Mr. Trump has been known for attacking his adversaries on Twitter, but not necessarily following through militarily or being inclined to drag the U.S. into longer conflicts. And when he has acted – as when he launched punitive airstrikes in Syria in April 2018, over Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons attacks – it ended up a one-and-done that did not alter Mr. Trump’s overall disengagement from the region.

Now, one strike may have changed that dynamic at a pivotal moment in his presidency – with impeachment hanging over his head, and with some critics faulting his administration’s foreign policy for disarray and lack of strategic thinking, everywhere from Iran and Iraq to North Korea and China.

Some analysts worry the strike could further intensify a conflict with Iran that has maintained a slow burn since Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and began imposing tough economic sanctions on Tehran. America’s friends and adversaries alike may see General Soleimani’s assassination as further evidence of a shoot-from-the-hip U.S. president who remains as unpredictable as ever. Was the strike an alarming one-off move, leaders may wonder, or an indication of new resolve in the Middle East?

No matter which assessment ends up closer to reality, America’s adversaries in particular – first among them Iran – are likely to remain true to form and ultimately take the longer view in responding to the Soleimani killing.

Iran, Russia, and Syria will all condemn the action. But they are also likely to recall that the earlier military action ordered by Mr. Trump in response to Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons ultimately did little to change the trajectory of an American withdrawal from the region that has benefitted all three U.S. adversaries.

Mr. Assad – the Syrian president whom the U.S. for a time said “has to go” – is on the verge of reasserting control over almost all of Syrian territory after a devastating civil war. Iran now basically has use of Syria as a corridor for funneling arms to proxies in Lebanon and elsewhere. And Russia’s foothold in the Middle East is broader and more secure than in decades.

Still, what makes some call this action a “game changer” in Middle East relations is how the killing of General Soleimani – in a third country to boot – is being widely interpreted as an act of war.

“We have moved from a shadow war and an economic war to a direct act of war by the Trump administration,” says Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy in Washington.

In an attempt to calm widespread jitters, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the phone early Friday with his Chinese and European counterparts, reassuring them that “the United States remains committed to de-escalation” with Iran, the State Department said.

But as Secretary Pompeo argues to America’s friends that the assassination was a “defensive action” in response to “imminent threats to American lives,” others in the region know from long experience that Iran will not leave General Soleimani’s death unanswered – and that the region is almost certain to bear the brunt of Iran’s ire.

Indeed the Pentagon appeared to be acknowledging that retaliation in some form is likely, announcing Friday that it will deploy an additional 3,500 troops to the region in response to Iran’s vow to seek “severe revenge” for General Soleimani’s death.

That does not mean Iran is likely to seek all-out warfare with a militarily superior U.S. Instead, expect Iran to redouble its efforts that have broadly paid off – strengthening proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere; debilitating America’s Sunni Arab regional allies; and pressing internationally with Russia, China, and even the Europeans that America’s unilateralism poses a global threat.

“Iran has no interest in fighting the United States militarily,” says Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Instead, it will wage its battles economically and politically, seeking to persuade target populations that the costs of fighting Iran exceed the benefits. The Iranians will cast rising global tensions as a consequence of U.S. aggression,” he adds.

Mr. Alterman says to expect “low-level actions” such as attacks against Persian Gulf shipping, fomenting low-scale violence in Gulf Cooperation Council countries, greater pressure on Lebanon, and perhaps above all, amplifying the political turmoil in Iraq that led to the U.S. drone strike on General Soleimani.

Iran is likely to push U.S. forces out of Iraq this year, Mr. Alterman says. Indeed the Iraqi parliament is expected to move to force a U.S. departure, with Mr. Trump suggesting the U.S. could very well leave if Iraq pulls in the welcome mat.

The killing of General Soleimani has had what some analysts are calling a “whiplash” effect among U.S. Gulf allies that had resigned themselves to a U.S. disengagement from the region – but which in a matter of 24 hours have switched to wondering if open conflict with Iran could be in the offing.

After Mr. Trump reversed his decision to retaliate over last year’s downing by Iran of an American drone, and then failed to respond after the drone attacks on Saudi ARAMCO oil fields, Gulf countries had decided Mr. Trump could not be pushed toward confrontation with Iran no matter the provocation.

But now U.S. allies in the region are preparing for a worst-case scenario: that their close association with Washington and their hosting of U.S. military, diplomatic, and commercial hubs make them targets for an Iranian response.

Noting that Tehran’s core interest is “regime survival,” Ms. Maloney of the Brookings Institution says any response to the Soleimani killing will be calibrated with that long-term objective in mind.

The Iranians “are very good at biding their time,” Ms. Maloney says, but “over time [they] have a way of making their feelings known.” 

Taylor Luck contributed reporting from Amman, Jordan.

The crisis in Butiaba began with a grave.

When a man named Makombela got sick in September in this isolated village in Congo’s lush green eastern borderlands, his family did just what the radio PSAs and awareness posters had instructed. They called an emergency number, and told them they had a possible Ebola case.

And when he died at a clinic, 50 miles away in a town they had never seen, the family swallowed their fear and consented again.

OK, they demurred, he could be buried there, in a cemetery shared by strangers.  

But back at home in Butiaba, a cluster of mud-brick houses huddled at the edge of the rainforest, the message hadn’t gotten through. The chief had already dispatched a group of young men to dig a grave in the town cemetery, a hacked-out clearing a few hundred meters into the forest. And now it sat gaping and empty like a crater.

This was a bad omen, said Moshi Katwakima, an elder. A man with an air of quiet authority, he told the chief that he had seen what happened when graves were left open in the past. Failed harvests. Scores of young people suddenly unable to find work.

The conversation quickly turned barbed. Why do we have to follow their rules, they wondered about the Ebola responders, when they clearly don’t respect ours?

When the young men in the village caught wind of the conversation, they decided on a plan. No more Ebola responders would be allowed in Butiaba, or on the dirt road that passed through the village. They couldn’t be trusted. Not after this.

**

Fifteen miles away, at the World Health Organization logistics base in the city of Mambasa, Dr. Julienne Anoko’s phone began to ring.

Since the world’s second-most deadly Ebola outbreak began in eastern Congo nearly 1 1/2 years ago, Dr. Anoko is often called when relationships with local communities get complicated. A Sorbonne-trained anthropologist from Cameroon, she has the job of heading off conflict between Ebola responders and the communities they’re meant to protect.

Slight and compact, with an easy laugh, Dr. Anoko seems at times the embodiment of what she hopes the Ebola response can do better: take up less space. Talk less and listen more. Disease outbreaks, she is fond of telling her colleagues, are often social crises as much as they are health emergencies.

That work has become especially urgent as responders reel from the murder of four of their own in two attacks by local militias on the night of Nov. 27. In 2019, nearly a dozen health care workers were killed and more than 80 injured in nearly 400 attacks on health facilities.

Meanwhile, the current epidemic has infected at least 3,200 people, and killed 2,200, since it began 16 months ago. There are no simple answers to why people keep dying this way. But Dr. Anoko also knows from two decades of experience in responding to disease outbreaks, from Zika in Latin America to Ebola in Guinea, that there are often good reasons for people to fear the experts who, from the outside, seem to have all the answers.

“What people want in times of suffering is empathy and compassion,” she says. What they often get, instead, is the brusque urgency of a giant international health bureaucracy trying to stop a disease from spreading.

And so she leads by example. Crawling into body bags and being carried through a town in the rainforest to understand complaints that the dead aren’t being carried gently. Crying with grieving mothers. Arm-wrestling teenage boys or learning a local dance, to break the ice. 

Today, as her colleagues explain the crisis in Butiaba, she imagines herself as part of one of the farming communities here who live and die by the loamy red dirt that squishes underfoot. Here, stability depends on the health of tidy rows of peanuts, beans, rice, and corn that flank the village. It is a fragile way to live, and the unseen forces that govern it can feel mercurial, even vengeful.

The problem, she explains, was us. We buried an elder far from home. We neglected to tell the leaders of his village. We made them afraid.

“So now we need to fix it.”

**

In theory, there has never been an easier time to fight Ebola. Since a 2013-16 outbreak killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa, researchers have developed and tested a highly effective vaccine. It has now been used to immunize nearly a quarter million Congolese, and a second vaccine has recently been introduced. Treatments are improving.   

But there is theory, and then there is the eastern Congo.

Kudra Maliro

In an average workday, Julienne Anoko may spend hours in the back of an SUV bouncing along flooded dirt roads to remote communites. On a recent Saturday, her convoy stopped to avoid a traffic jam with local cyclists and motorcycle drivers.

For more than two decades, the region has been convulsed by war, which neither the Congolese government or the world’s largest United Nations peacekeeping force has been able to stop. In its major towns, baby-faced soldiers patrol the streets with AK-47s slung over their shoulders like school backpacks. U.N. tanks roll through neighborhoods of tin-roofed houses and tiny convenience stores, swiveling their guns this way and that in warning to would-be attackers. And still, somehow, massacres and kidnappings by militia groups go on, month after month, year after year.

Locals have a lifetime of experience watching outsiders – from the capital, Kinshasa, from the U.N., from international aid groups – arrive with cash and promises they can’t keep. And in their eyes, whatever the crisis, someone always stands to get rich.

Although the WHO and the Congolese government say the response to Ebola is woefully underfunded, from a local perspective it is practically printing money. International organizations working for La Riposte­ – the response – jostle along the region’s stomach-churning dirt roads in new SUVs, booking out hotels and building state-of-the-art disease treatment centers in the shadow of crumbling public hospitals.

Many here see the disease, at worst, as a complete fabrication, and at best a smokescreen, yet another excuse for outsiders to get rich off the region’s suffering.

That puts Dr. Anoko in a paradoxical position. No matter how many times or how gently she tells people that she too is a mother, she too is an African, she is also an outsider here. And workers like her have been hired to make the response work better, “not to criticize the institutions doing the responding,” says Adia Benton, an anthropologist at Northwestern University who has researched international public health responses in Africa.

The scholar in her, meanwhile, often hungers to slow down. She has always been dogged and exact in her work. Back when she was a young anthropologist in training, she spent weeks wandering around a French village learning about their wine growing culture (“everyone wondered who that black girl with the foreign accent was,” she recalls), and then years learning to hunt with a group of hunter-gatherers in Cameroon. Now, she is lucky if she can spend more than a day in one village, untangling as much as she can of its history and traditions before she is back on the road, headed to the epidemic’s next crisis spot.  

Most days, the best she can do is just get her colleagues to look up from their PowerPoints, which swarm with numbers and the cold, clipped language of disease control – the deceased and the cured, suspected and probable and confirmed cases.

“It may seem strange, but it’s easy to forget that Ebola cases aren’t just numbers, they are people,” she says. “People we are meeting at the worst moments of their lives. To understand what they are doing, especially when it doesn’t seem logical to us, we need to feel what they are feeling.”

It isn’t doctors, Dr. Anoko knows, who decide whether people follow the tradition-bending demands of this disease, whether they stop cuddling their sick children or wiping the brows of their feverish spouses. It’s worried mothers and heartsick husbands and grieving friends.

“That’s a hard thing to accept, I know, for scientists who spent 10 years studying to be where they are – that it might be a woman in a village with no [formal] education who decides if their protocols work,” she says. “But it’s the truth.”

And so there she is, asking to be carried in a body bag. (Once she instructed burial teams on how to carry the dead more gently, she says, people stopped objecting to their loved ones being buried in sterile biohazard bags.)

And there she is gathering community leaders after an Ebola treatment center was burned to the ground in Butembo, their anger still a live wire. Not because the treatment center had burned. But because no one had thought to ask them if they wanted it built in the first place.

So she asked.

Yes, they assured her, they did want another clinic, but it must be built with their own hands. A place made by the sweat of their women would sacred, they told her. (Not to mention, she knew, if leaders bought into the clinic, they might be able to keep the local militants who had likely burned its predecessor at bay.)

In the end, locals rebuilt and blessed the clinic. It hasn’t been attacked since.

Jerome Delay/AP

Health workers dressed in protective gear begin their shift at an Ebola treatment center in Beni, Congo DRC July 16, 2019. The World Health Organization said Friday Nov. 22, 2019, there has been “a very dangerous and alarming development” in efforts to end the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo, warning that the eruption of violence may re-ignite the epidemic.

But often her work is far less dramatic. She often spends hours in the back of SUVs bound for this and that village resistant to the response, bouncing along dirt roads cratered with holes as wide as the car that turn into four-foot-deep mud puddles whenever it rains. Sometimes, there is a crackle of gunfire ahead and the car turns back. Sometimes the road ends and she has to continue on foot, squelching through the mud in black rain boots.

And when she arrives, after she settles into the town’s dark airless concrete schoolhouse or under a drooping mango tree, her job is often to sit and be yelled at.  

People have always gotten sick here from diseases we couldn’t cure, someone might ask. Why didn’t anyone come to help us then? 

How can you expect a mother to let strangers take her sick baby away from her?

Why did we never see this disease before all of these foreigners arrived? Why are you trying to kill us?

“Why hasn’t anyone from our village been hired to help with safe Ebola burials?” a man asked her recently at a community meeting, referring to the teams in spacesuit-like protective gear who urgently descend on the dead with jugs of chlorine. “We don’t know these people who are taking our families away.”

No matter how many times she has heard a particular complaint before, Dr. Anoko always writes it down. And she always says thank you.

“This will help us make the response work better,” she says, after listening to someone tell her for the hundredth time that they have heard no one comes out of an Ebola treatment center alive. “Thank you for coming to speak with us today.”

**

In those stuffy rooms, on those long afternoons, Dr. Anoko doesn’t say it, but she thinks sometimes, I know how you feel.

Richard Valery Mouzoko Kiboung was a Cameroonian epidemiologist with high cheekbones and a wry sense of humor, a man with a long history of slogging away at disease outbreaks the world seemed to have forgotten. But before any of that, he was also her best friend’s baby brother, the eager younger sibling hovering on the edge of their after-school games in the Cameroonian city of Bafia.

And so, when there was time at the end of their long days, they filled each other in on 20 years of missed biography. He spoke to her in Bafia, their mother tongue, which had grown distant and awkward on her lips.

“He reminded me of the words,” she says. And when he wrote her WhatsApp messages, he always began them the same way.

Bonjour grande soeur. Hey, big sister.

On April 19, Dr. Anoko returned to WHO headquarters to a hushed scene. Colleagues told her that gunmen had stormed a staff meeting at a hospital in Butembo, where she was based at the time. “Ebola doesn’t exist. You’ve invented the disease,” they allegedly yelled as they sprayed the room with bullets. Two people had been injured. And Dr. Richard was dead.

**

He was gone and she was still there. Still convincing the communities his killers had come from to trust her. Still trying to end a disease, in communities that often seemed to resent the effort.

Outside the Ebola bubble, meanwhile, life went on. Her sister sent photos of her niece’s fourth birthday in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and she ached for the milestones she was missing. Her husband texted his Bitmoji blowing her a kiss, and videos from their teenage son’s jazz band concert. Soon, he’d graduate from high school. She didn’t want to miss that too.

She didn’t go home in December, when bullets from militants punched holes in the wall of her hotel room in the city of Beni and she slept on the floor for three days wondering if they’d be back. She didn’t go home when one treatment center was burned to the ground, and then another. And while she did go home to bury Richard, flying in the WHO-chartered plane beside his coffin, she came back.  

“It was the greatest mistake they could have made to kill Richard. Now everything we do is to continue what he started,” she says.

Everything, including the goat.

Because in the end, that is what drove Ebola out of Butiaba, the village with the empty grave. Not the checkpoints that line the main roads here, manned by listless soldiers with AK-47s and women with chirping electronic thermometers. Not the cheesy awareness jingle that crooned out of tinny speakers across the region. Ebola, ebola, invisible enemy.

It was 50 kilos of rice, enough neon red palm oil to fill a bathtub, and a goat.

When Dr. Anoko arrived in Butiaba a few months ago, just after the grave had been opened, that’s what the chief told her they needed. To make amends to the spirits angered by the open grave, he explained, they would perform a ceremonial burial. Lay a banana frond – “the lifeblood of our village” – in the grave and then hold the funeral. And then there would be a party to celebrate the old man’s life – hence the food.

So Dr. Anoko secured a budget of $179 and made her purchases.

“What I’m trying to give people is the kind of compassion I have looked for in the difficult moments in my own life,” she says.

It was a small victory. But all around, the response was still struggling. Every day, wheezing 18-wheelers and old passenger buses passed through the dusty main drag of Mambasa, a trade hub where Ebola was spreading. A sick person could be in Kisangani, a city of 1.6 million, within a day. And from there, head down the Congo River to the densely populated capital, Kinshasa.

A few days after the ceremony, a Red Cross burial team was turned away from a village two hours from Mambasa. The community wouldn’t let them out of their cars to bury a man who had died there. “We’ve never seen you here before,” one leader told the team.

And why should they do any different? Dr. Anoko thought aloud.

“We are managing an outbreak in a place where people have been suffering for two decades, where they’ve been raped and slaughtered. And yet we want them to believe it’s Ebola they must be most afraid of,” she says.

Had she had the chance with that village, she thought, she would have come sooner. She would have been there to ask what the local burial traditions were and to begin negotiating.

It might not have worked. But it is always worth trying, she believes.

“What I say to people is, no, [Ebola] isn’t the most terrifying thing you’ll ever see,” she says “But this is a terrifying thing you have control over. This is one story whose ending you can write.”

Kudra Maliro contributed reporting.

Michael Dalder/Reuters/File

Captaining river boats, like this one on the Volga River in Samara, is one of the jobs long legally barred to Russian women that will be opened up next year.

Svetlana Medvedeva spent years studying for her chosen profession, Volga River boat captain, before she hit a roadblock in the form of a law she had never heard of.

Ms. Medvedeva had the necessary degree, training, and years of experience working aboard the passenger ships that ply the vast Volga River, which flows by her home town of Samara. But in 2012 she was denied advancement because commanding a riverboat was one of 456 professions in Russia legally barred to women for being considered too hazardous or arduous for them to perform. She ended up suing over the law.

“I was blocked from doing what I wanted not because I was unqualified, but just because I was a woman,” says Ms. Medvedeva. She spent five years fighting in the courts, received support from the United Nations, and eventually won her landmark court victory in 2017. “My case was one of the first gender discrimination suits, and the court in Samara recognized it.”

That may have had some impact in Moscow. After a lengthy bureaucratic process, Russia’s Ministry of Labor announced in July that the list of banned occupations for women would be reduced to just under 100 in 2021 when, among many other things, women will legally be allowed to be river boat captains.

But it’s not much help for Ms. Medvedeva, whose qualifications were deemed to be outdated after her long legal battle, and who now works in a maintenance station for oil tankers in Samara. And experts warn that occupational equality still has a long way to go, both in terms of jobs still barred to women and in subtler gender discrimination outside legal obstacles.

“I think these changes have been made because women have finally begun to raise their voices and complain,” she says. “After I launched my gender discrimination case, there were others by women who wanted to drive trains and long-distance trucks. It’s a disgrace how many women have been blocked from realizing their dreams because of this law.

“I know a lot of cases when women were fired because of their gender. Women will still be prevented from being divers, miners, and steelworkers. There are women who work in the firefighting service but, no matter what they may wish, remained confined to office work. So it’s not over.”

Legal logic

The Soviet-era laws, which were renewed and extended at the beginning of the Putin era, reflect a very different approach to “protecting” women compared with the principles that have guided the struggle for women’s equality in the West. They make it illegal for a woman to hold any job that requires her to lift more than 20 pounds twice an hour. The jobs legally barred to women include miner; diver; worker in chemical or metallurgical factory; and driver of trains, metro, or long-distance trucks.

The USSR actually made its list of banned female occupations a centerpiece of propaganda by highlighting the state’s concern for women’s “reproductive health” and general well-being. In reality, Soviet women bore the brunt of menial work, long hours, and low pay, in addition to shouldering much of the burden in their home lives.

The post-Soviet era has seen some improvements, with many educated women moving up in the professional and business worlds. But for most, the loss of Soviet-era privileges such as guaranteed employment and free day care have not been offset with new opportunities. Even though the list that kept them from taking on some of the most skilled and highest-paying occupations is about to be dramatically shortened, the underlying law that blocks them on principle is still in place.

“This is a step in the right direction, and the changes do reflect a global tendency which we in Russia are following,” says Galina Mikhalyova, who speaks on gender issues for the liberal Yabloko party. “These lists were always filled with contradictions anyway. Why is it that a woman could drive a tram, but not a metro train? Why could women who work on railway construction regularly lift [railroad ties] that weigh almost 50 pounds, but not do other jobs that require lifting? Occupations permitted to women generally coincide with lower paid and lower status jobs, while the better ones were always reserved for men.”

Russian women’s rights activists say the basic law should reflect values like those promoted by the U.N., which would ensure no gender discrimination for any job, but require employers to make all workplaces equally accessible and safe for everyone.

“If some job is inherently unsafe, why do we let men do it?” says Lyudmila Ayvar, a Moscow human rights lawyer. “This is progress, but it’s nothing like a solution. Just because they have shortened that list doesn’t mean there will be a crush of women rushing to take those jobs. We will still face more subtle forms of discrimination. Employers will continue to choose men, because they are [perceived to be] less likely to rush home to their families, or take time off for maternity reasons, and it will be much harder to prove that it’s because of gender discrimination.”

‘This work is not for women’

Some women have found a niche, or a way around the rules. Olga Silantyeva drives an emergency vehicle for a first-responder team in the Moscow region. She says that she has earned the respect of the men she works with and enjoys her job. But there have been frustrations. As a qualified automotive engineer, she had previously applied for jobs as a truck driver and been turned down. On one occasion she’d been told that the position was filled, but later discovered that it was still open.

“I am a fan of the road, and I love driving, especially northern routes,” she says. “My present job is not on the banned list, but when I first applied for it I was told, ‘This work is not for women.’ I was persistent, and did get the job. It’s exciting work. We do emergency and rescue missions all over the region. But, it’s annoying that I am still not allowed to engage in firefighting. My boss would actually get punished if I was injured in a fire, therefore I am not allowed to go to anyplace where fighting a fire is a factor.”

Yuliana Kott has not been so lucky. Her dream was to work on Arctic icebreakers, and she graduated college as a qualified maritime navigator. And she got a job as 4th mate on the Akademik Fedorov, one of the most famous Russian icebreakers, but lost the job over questions about her legal right to perform it. Her gender discrimination suit is still pending, and meanwhile she is unemployed.

“Even if the ban is lifted, it will still be hard to get in,” she says. “The main obstacle is men. They just don’t like a woman intruding into what they regard as their space.”

Things are changing gradually, says Alexander Shershukov, deputy chairman of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia.

“Reducing the list of banned occupations is a good beginning,” he says. “But even in jobs where women work alongside men, they tend to make from 20% to 30% less. There are many, many problems, and this issue of prohibited jobs is only one of them. What we would like to see is a situation where all jobs are available to any qualified applicant, and offer equal conditions and equal pay for those who perform them. We are not there yet.”

Setsuko Thurlow can’t give her testimony without feeling some amount of pain. Telling her story involves reliving memories of fear and shock, losing loved ones and nearly her life. But it’s also the only thing she can do to honor those who died. Giving her testimony is hard, she says, but she feels she has no choice. It is her “moral obligation” to tell it.

Ms. Thurlow is a hibakusha, an atomic bomb survivor. More than a mile outside Hiroshima, Japan, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on the city, she survived without major injuries but would never be the same. She didn’t know it then, but telling that story would become her life’s purpose.

An activist for decades, Ms. Thurlow has repeated her testimony to students, teachers, politicians, the pope – anyone, she says, who will listen. Advocating for nuclear disarmament has taken her around the world, from Hiroshima to the United Nations General Assembly in New York to Oslo, Norway, where in 2017, she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

Almost 75 years after the bombing of Hiroshima, this may be the last generation able to hear directly from hibakusha. Ms. Thurlow says she feels an urgency to tell her story while she still can.

“Most atomic bomb survivors do not share their story. It’s simply too painful,” says Kathleen Sullivan, head of ICAN’s Hibakusha Stories program, which brings survivors to speak in New York public schools. “For those that do, it’s very, very important that especially in these closing moments … we who have the opportunity can hear their firsthand witness and inculcate that into our own lives.”

“The world was ending”

Ms. Thurlow’s testimony begins on a Monday morning on the outskirts of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. She was one of around 30 students tasked to decode messages for the Japanese military, and it was her first day on the job. She was 13, new to the eighth grade.

At a quarter past eight, she saw a bluish-white flash out the window. She felt like she was floating. She passed out and woke up trapped under rubble. The morning now looked like night because of the dust and smoke in the air. She thought the world was ending.

Someone – she doesn’t know who – pulled her from the wreckage, and she found her way to a field filled with survivors. Later she found family members, including both her parents, who survived the blast. They were able to stay at her uncle’s house outside the city, where life went on.

It wasn’t until years later that Ms. Thurlow’s activism began. After finishing university in Japan, she traveled to Virginia in 1954 to study sociology at the University of Lynchburg. That same year, the United States had tested the Castle Bravo nuclear bomb – estimated to be 1,000 times as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima. Ms. Thurlow says the new weapon upset her and many of her Japanese peers.

“We made a vow that we are not going to [forget] our school friends, loved ones, all those hundreds of thousands of people who perished in that bombing,” she says. “We’re not just going to abandon them. We want to make sure that their death has some meaning.

NTB Scanpix/Berit Roald/Reuters/File

Leader of the Nobel Committee Berit Reiss-Andersen (left) presents the Nobel Peace Prize to Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow (center) and Beatrice Fihn, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, in Oslo, Norway December 10, 2017.

A week after entering the U.S., she says, she gave an interview opposing the nuclear test – only to receive hate mail in the days after. “If you don’t like this country, why don’t you leave?” she says people wrote. But to her, respecting those who died in Hiroshima meant telling her story.

“That’s the only thing I can do for those loved ones,” she says. “That’s the only thing I could do, and that’s the thing I’m going to do as long as I live.”

After marrying and spending decades as a social worker in Toronto, she partnered with ICAN in the mid-2000s. On behalf of the organization, she spoke to world leaders at U.N. summits and was crucial in the 2017 adoption of a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons, Ms. Sullivan says. The treaty requires 50 ratifications to take effect; it has 34 so far.

Part of what makes Ms. Thurlow’s testimony so powerful, says Ms. Sullivan, is her command of English. But the story itself, she adds, empowers its listeners. In a post-Cold War world, Ms. Sullivan thinks young people in particular tend to either ignore nuclear weapons or accept them as inevitable. Ms. Thurlow fights that assumption.

“A story of hope”

During a recent talk at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts, Ms. Thurlow speaks to a crowd of nearly 100 students. For an hour and a half, they listen silently, phones away and eyes attentive. At the end, they give her a standing ovation.

“I am so concerned [that] when people talk about nuclear weapons it’s something ancient that happened a long time ago, far away from real life,” Ms. Thurlow tells the crowd.

“So I thought by sharing my personal experiences that will help you to appreciate and understand the nuclear weapons issue perhaps more sensitively, with a greater degree of empathy.”

Miyako Kurosaki, a student who helped organize the event, had met Ms. Thurlow before while working as a journalist in Japan. Since arriving at Tufts, she says she’s wanted to invite a hibakusha to the university.

Every issue has two sides, says Ms. Kurosaki: above the crowd and under the crowd. The first involves abstract theory, which students get in the classroom. The second involves an issue’s human impact. She says students rarely get to see “under the crowd” with nuclear weapons, which is why she wanted Ms. Thurlow to come. In Ms. Kurosaki’s opinion, people can’t make informed decisions on nuclear weapons without seeing their effect on humans themselves.

“[Students at the Fletcher School] want to be a policymaker in the future,” says Ms. Kurosaki. “So I wanted to share this particularly: The nuclear weapons issue has a humanitarian perspective.”

During the Q&A after the talk, a member of the audience called Ms. Thurlow’s testimony a “story of hope.” Ms. Thurlow says she finds her own hope in the people she speaks to, even those who disagree with her. Advocating for nuclear disarmament – a mission with frequent setbacks – takes resilience. She says she didn’t learn that resilience from surviving the bomb itself, but from an experience a month later, when a typhoon hit Hiroshima.    

She got caught in the rains and flooding one day coming home. When she arrived, she threw herself on the floor and moped: “Why did this have to happen to me? First an atomic bomb and now this typhoon?”

She expected comfort from her parents, but her father – not usually one to scold – was stern. “You are alive, you have life,” she says he said. “You have your parents. You have a roof over your head. What more do you expect?”

“That electrified me, really,” she says. “That shocked me, forced me to think, ‘Yeah, I am alive,’ although I have been just surrounded by death and misery. But I guess it never got through to me, into the core of my being. At that moment I am alive. I’m going to live.”

Editors note: This story has been updated to clarify that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons requires signature and ratification to take effect. 

Michael Spooneybarger/Reuters/File

Empty beer cans litter the beach during spring break festivities in Panama City Beach, Fla.

A century ago this month well-meaning reformers managed to ban the purchase or transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States. Their high aim was to eliminate the drunkenness that had led to so much human misery.

The 18th Amendment that brought Prohibition stayed in effect only 13 years until repealed in 1933. Though the law produced many good outcomes (Henry Ford noted that absenteeism on his automobile assembly lines dropped dramatically) it has largely been seen as a failed attempt at governmental social engineering. The reformers had quickly lost the public relations battle: Drinking in defiance of the ban became a show of personal freedom, an exuberant way to defy authority. So much for that noble effort to end a social scourge.

But 100 years later the abstinence movement seems to be rising from the opposite direction, welling up, one individual at a time, in people who sense that drinking isn’t making their lives better or happier, but rather worse. 

The “Dry January” movement began in Britain seven years ago. The idea was to make the first month of the year a time to experiment with a life without alcohol. Another anti-drinking meme called Sober Curious extends the concept to any time of year. 

Last year 47% of Americans said they were making an effort to cut their consumption of alcohol, according to research firm Nielsen. That figure rose to 66% among millennials.

Suddenly nonalcoholic drinks (“mocktails” and zero-alcohol beer) are in fashion. Even some alcohol-free nightspots have sprung up. 

Warnings about long-term effects on physical and mental health from alcohol use have been issued for many years. But they’ve failed to have much influence on what is a day-to-day, live-in-the-moment decision. 

This time around people are finding plenty of immediate good effects to be a persuasive reason to quit. “I actually have more fun without alcohol,” one recovering alcoholic recently told CBS News.

“I noticed I was sleeping better, I had more energy, I felt less anxious. It was easier to stick to my healthy eating goals,” a Dry January participant is quoted as saying on the WebMD website. Eventually, the woman adds, she realized she didn’t even want to drink anymore.

The costs to society of drinking are well known. The movement to stop drunk driving continues to spotlight the tragic results of alcohol abuse. The link between alcohol abuse and violent attacks on women has been well established.

So, do Dry January and Sober Curious signal that a deep and lasting change in public attitudes is emerging? Will they lead to wider recognition that the joys of life can be celebrated, and actually experience more deeply, without inebriation? 

That shift in thought would do more good than any new law reformers might ever devise.