Myo Zaw and his team of volunteer rescue workers were the first to arrive at the site where a three-story house had collapsed in Mandalay, a little after 8 p.m. on Saturday. They were digging through the rubble with their bare hands when they heard the voice of a girl.

It was faint but clear. “Help me, I’m here,” she said.

It took them three or four hours to pull out the 12-year-old, who had survived despite the house toppling around her. But in the early hours of Sunday morning, there was only silence as the rescuers continued to work in nearly 100-degree heat. They eventually unearthed three bodies: the girl’s mother and her grandparents.

“Sadly, I fear we will find more bodies than survivors,” Mr. Myo Zaw said. “The heat in Mandalay is intense, causing rapid decomposition. In some cases, we locate the bodies only because of the smell.”

Time is running short in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city with about 1.5 million people, which is near the epicenter of Friday’s devastating earthquake. In one neighborhood in Mandalay, countless buildings were reduced to rubble, satellite images showed.

Across the country, over 1,600 people were confirmed dead, as of Saturday night, and over 3,000 injured in the worst earthquake to hit Myanmar in more than a century. Many fear that the number of people who can be rescued will dwindle after Monday evening, the crucial 72-hour mark after which experts say the chances of survival drop sharply.

Even as volunteer rescuers scoured the ruins of homes, monasteries and mosques, and hospitals overflowed with patients, aftershocks — including a strong one on Sunday — kept residents on edge. Several buildings in Mandalay that had survived Friday’s powerful earthquake toppled on Sunday.

And the military made clear it would not stop a brutal bombing campaign in a civil war that has ravaged the country despite the urgent need for relief efforts, with reports of an airstrike on Sunday afternoon in Pakokku Township in Magway Region in the country’s northwest that killed two women and injured seven others.

How the military government and its commander in chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, an already deeply unpopular leader who ousted a civilian government four years ago, responds in the coming days and weeks could determine the junta’s hold on power. The military government has already lost ground to rebels in the civil war, which had left nearly 20 million of the country’s roughly 54 million people in need of shelter and food even before the quake, according to U.N. officials.

In the early hours after the earthquake, a lack of machinery and personnel severely hampered rescue operations. But the arrival of Chinese rescue teams with heavy equipment on Saturday night has given volunteers a glimmer of hope.

On Sunday, volunteers rescued 29 people from a collapsed apartment building in Mandalay and recovered eight bodies, according to Soe Paing, a rescue worker from the Myanmar fire service department. He said the help from the Chinese had sped up the work.

“Right now, we believe around 90 people are still trapped inside,” he said, “and we are doing everything we can to get them out alive.”

Later in the day, an aftershock struck Mandalay, sending residents into the streets, screaming in fear.

Many are confronting an uncertain future, rationing food, and wondering how they can get by without any power and scarce water. Volunteers asked for more body bags for the corpses that they are pulling out by the hour. Many have said that the army has done little to help.

Aid from other countries has also begun arriving, but questions remain about how the Myanmar army would distribute the much-needed relief. At least half a dozen nations, including India, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore and Thailand, have sent teams and supplies. Some of the aid, such as a group from Singapore as well as supplies from India, has gone to Naypyidaw, the capital, where the military’s generals live and which was less affected than Mandalay.

“They have a long track record of using aid as a weapon,” said Scot Marciel, the U.S. ambassador to Myanmar from 2016 to 2020, said of the military government. “I would think that they would try to use it to funnel aid to their supporters and prevent it from getting to people in the areas controlled by the resistance. I don’t have faith in them that they would do the right thing.”

Padoh Saw Taw Nee, the spokesman for the rebel Karen National Union, said the group welcomed the support of foreign countries but warned them to be “aware of the nature of the military in our country.”

He pointed out that the military had not refrained from attacks even after the earthquake, saying: “They might use the money for the war. We worry about this issue.”

Control of Myanmar is now divided between the military regime, which governs the urban areas, and the ethnic armies, who hold the borderlands. Since the 2021 coup, Sagaing — another region that has been hit hard by the earthquake — has also emerged as a center of resistance and is home to a patchwork of rebel groups. (Internet access has been cut off in Sagaing, making it difficult to get reports from there.)

An hour after Friday’s earthquake, a military paramotor, or motor-powered paraglider, dropped bombs in Chaung Oo village in Sagaing, said Phyu Win, a resident. “People were already terrified from the quake, and with the chaos, it was impossible to take cover in bomb shelters,” she said.

The army’s airplanes have continued to fly overhead since the earthquake. “The junta has no interest in helping people,” Ms. Phyu Win said. “They only want to kill.”

At one point last year, the rebels had advanced close to Mandalay, which was seen by many to be a potential tipping point in the war.

Experts say the earthquake could change the trajectory of the civil war. The National Unity Government, the shadow government in exile, has called for a two-week pause in fighting, but it does not speak for the multiple rebel groups and ethnic armies fighting government forces. The powerful Arakan Army, which has won control of large parts of Rakhine State in Myanmar, could exploit this moment to wrest the south of the country away from the junta.

Much will also depend on how General Min Aung Hlaing and his military view this moment.

“Their backs are to the wall and they can’t cope,” Khin Zaw Win, a political analyst and director of the Tampadipa Institute, a research group in Yangon, said of the military rulers. “We have come to the point where the military will be forced to relent.”

Richard Horsey, a senior adviser on Myanmar for the International Crisis Group, called the earthquake “a moment of jeopardy for Min Aung Hlaing.”

“It’s really a critical moment for him, his legacy, but also his current regime,” Mr. Horsey said. “He doesn’t exactly know how this is going to play out — it’s difficult to guess — but he knows that there will be huge political aftershocks.”

Verena Hölzl contributed reporting from Bangkok.

A video that circulated widely on the internet recently showed a Haitian gang leader, Joseph Wilson, shirtless, happily showing off belts of .50 caliber ammunition, mockingly saying he used the armor-piercing bullets to groom his hair.

“We have enough combs for our hair to last a year,” he joked.

So how did he get them?

Guns are not manufactured in Haiti, and it’s illegal to ship any there, but the gangs terrorizing the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, never seem to be short of them — or of ammunition.

Experts estimate that there are about 20 armed groups operating in Port-au-Prince, some who carry AR-15 and Galil assault rifles, shotguns and Glock handguns. The U.N. estimates that between 270,000 and 500,000 firearms are circulating illegally in Haiti, with most weapons in the hands of gangs.

Their superior fire power has overwhelmed the thin ranks of Haiti’s ill-equipped police and contributed to an astonishing death toll last year of more than 5,600 homicide victims, a jump of more than 1,000 from the year before.

The United Nations imposed an arms embargo on Haiti three years ago, yet most weapons on Haiti’s streets are from the United States, where they are purchased by straw buyers and smuggled into the country by sea or sometimes by land through the Dominican Republic, according to the United Nations.

The issue has become so serious that Haiti’s government has restricted imports along its land border with the Dominican Republic. Only goods that were originally produced there are allowed; any products that didn’t originate in the D.R. have to enter through Haiti’s gang-infested seaports.

As Haiti’s capital grapples with a violent crisis that threatens its very existence, questions remain about whether Haiti and other nations — including the United States — are doing enough to control the tide of weapons.

“If you stop the flow of guns and bullets, the gangs eventually, literally, run out of ammunition,” said Bill O’Neill, the U.N.’s independent human rights expert for Haiti. “That’s a quicker, faster, safer way to dismantle them.”

Where are the weapons coming from?

In short, Florida.

South Florida, including the ports of Miami and Fort Lauderdale, was the point of origin for 90 percent of Caribbean-bound shipments of illicit firearms reported between 2016 and 2023, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Gangs sometimes acquire guns and ammunition by attacking police stations in Haiti or by bribing local police into providing weapons. Nearly 1,000 police guns were diverted in the past four years, the U.N. said this week, and police officers have been reported to sell them on the black market.

But weapons are more typically smuggled in shipping containers and aboard freighters leaving South Florida, hidden among tightly packed jumbles of bicycles, cars, electrical goods, clothing and food.

U.N. officials and private security experts say traffickers altered their tactics in recent months to avoid increased inspections on the Miami River, a five-mile waterway that cuts through the city of Miami and has long been a hotbed for contraband.

Smugglers expanded their operations to new routes between Florida and the Dominican Republic, including Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, a large cruise ship and cargo facility, the U.N. said in a recent report.

What guns are being smuggled?

So far this year, Dominican officials have made two large seizures of smuggled firearms at the port of Haina, near the capital, Santo Domingo.

In February, Dominican Customs agents made what they described as the country’s largest seizure of weapons destined for Haiti.

Nearly two dozen firearms, including a Barrett .50 caliber semiautomatic rifle and 15 AK-47-style assault rifles, as well as 36,000 rounds were inside a container on the Sara Express, a 35-year-old freighter that runs a regular route between Miami and the Dominican Republic.

The owner of the Miami company listed on the bill of lading was arrested in the Dominican Republic.

A second shipment from New York seized in January at the same Dominican port may also have been bound for Haiti, investigators said. That shipment included 37 guns, and several Kalashnikov-style rifles with labels showing they were manufactured in Vermont and Georgia.

In November, Dominican authorities arrested several Dominican police officers accused of smuggling nearly one million rounds of ammunition from a police depot. At least one of the buyers was from Haiti, Dominican court records show.

Has law enforcement had any success?

In response to a September letter from several members of Congress who asked for more to be done to address weapons smuggling to Haiti, the U.S. Commerce Department, which regulates firearms exports, said in December that none of its 11 foreign-based export control officers were posted in the Caribbean because of a lack of funds.

Still, the agency said that during the Biden administration, nine Haiti-related investigations resulted in convictions.

More recently, other federal law enforcement agencies have pursued several Haiti weapons cases.

Last month, a 31-year-old police officer in St. Cloud, Florida, pleaded guilty to purchasing and reselling at least 58 firearms as part of a scheme that sent hundreds of weapons to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Haiti.

In January, a 34-year-old undocumented migrant from Guatemala, Ricardo Sune-Girón, pleaded guilty to firearms trafficking in Tampa. According to a plea agreement, Mr. Sune-Girón recruited straw purchasers to illegally buy 900 firearms — including assault rifles — that he then transported from Florida to the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

A former security officer for Haiti’s chief of police was arrested in Florida in December after investigators linked him to nearly 90 firearms.

How is law enforcement tackling the problem?

Haiti has few resources like scanners and border guards to tackle the problem of smuggled firearms at its borders and ports, while experts say the United States has limited capability to search exported goods at domestic ports and typically performs only random cargo inspections.

Ships sailing to Haiti from the United States are often jammed with assorted cargo, from second hand clothing to household appliances, bicycles and cars, making it easy to hide contraband.

In one case, disassembled guns discovered aboard a freighter on the Miami River bound for Haiti were hidden in shipments that included tennis rackets, fruit juice, rice and clothing.

“We show up unannounced,” said Anthony Hernandez, a Customs and Border Protection agent who testified at the federal trial in Miami in January of an accused smuggler. “We do our best to get to as much as we can.”

Haiti’s law enforcement authorities did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

What about the Dominican Republic?

In the Dominican Republic, the United States supports a special unit of 30 local Customs agents, with another 20 currently being vetted to work on U.S.-related cases.

The authorities have tightened controls, including adding eight new X-ray scanners at main ports, where all cargo destined for Haiti is examined, the Dominican foreign ministry said.

Dominican Customs officials track all suspicious shipments to catch and prosecute traffickers, a U.S. embassy representative who was not authorized to speak publicly said, questioning whether the Dominican Republic was an important source of illegal guns to Haiti.

Dominican Customs authorities referred questions to prosecutors, who declined to comment.

So what can be done to stop it?

Critics say not enough is done to regulate the sale of weapons in the United States to straw buyers, an illegal practice in which people buy guns on behalf of another person, including traffickers. The practice is responsible for a large number of the arms that wind up used in crimes in Mexico and throughout Latin America.

Dealers often ignore easily detectable purchasing patterns by gun traffickers posing as legitimate customers and repeatedly buying multiple weapons, experts say.

“That’s where you can stop this,” Jonathan Lowy, founder of Global Action on Gun Violence said. “It’s very difficult to stop once the guns are in the hands of the trafficker. They can be broken down and put in a crate of breakfast cereal or fruit juices.”

Students in France will learn about something new starting in September: sex, gender stereotypes and consent.

Nearly a quarter-century after the French government passed a law mandating — but never putting in place — sex education for every student, it has finally developed and approved a curriculum for sex education classes, with a plan for teacher training and course materials.

“We have been waiting 25 years for this,” said Sarah Durocher, president of Le Planning Familial, a French equivalent of Planned Parenthood — one of three nonprofit organizations that sued the government in 2023 for not implementing its own law.

That lawsuit has yet to be resolved in court. But the government pushed the curriculum through on its own, over the protests of opponents who criticized it as “ideological brainwashing” and harmful to children’s development.

More than 100 senators with the conservative party Les Républicains signed an op-ed, published in Le Figaro newspaper, opposing the program’s “woke ideology” and demanding all mentions of “gender identity” be removed.

But Elisabeth Borne, the education minister, called the new program “absolutely essential.”

She highlighted the findings of an independent commission, which showed that one child in France is sexually abused every three minutes, mostly by a male member of their family. Many kids now learn about sex from online pornography sites, she pointed out.

Although the curriculum is set to take effect in September, opponents are still fighting; a coalition of a few groups have filed a lawsuit to stop it before France’s top administrative court.

Activists and experts say adoption of the curriculum was propelled by changing attitudes in France about sex since the #MeToo movement.

“Public opinion now understands it’s necessary to talk to children about this kind of thing, because otherwise they will stay silent,” said Yves Verneuil, a professor of education at the University of Lyon. “The ministry, consequently, saw this change of mentality.”

The highly publicized trial last fall of dozens of men, found guilty of raping a woman named Gisèle Pelicot while she was deeply sedated, also had an effect, experts say. The case ignited discussions across the country about the casual banality of rape, the objectification of women and the lack of understanding of what consent is, and how it should be given before sex.

“How could those men have said they got consent when seeing a drugged, passed-out woman?” Ms. Durocher said. “It raised the question of how we teach consent.”

On paper, the French government has offered sex education since 1973. But the courses were optional and parents could pull their children from them, explained Mr. Verneuil, the professor, who has written a book on the history of sex education in France.

In 2001, the government introduced a law specifically requiring three annual sessions of sexual education for every student. Subsequent governments expanded the course contents to include not just classes on STDs and the risks of pregnancy, but sexism, homophobia, sexual violence and the concept of consent, Mr. Verneuil said.

However, no specific curriculum was developed, no budget or specialized training introduced and no personnel put in place to teach the classes, said Audrey Chanonat, a leader of the French union representing the principals of middle and high schools.

At the middle school in Cognac where she is a principal, those courses required more than 100 hours of staff time.

“I don’t have the personnel for it,” she said, noting that the staff did cover some of the topics in ninth-grade biology.

“A real education program for sexual and intimate relationships with three hours per class? That exists almost nowhere,” Ms. Chanonat said.

A 2021 report by the auditing department of the Ministry of Education, Sport and Research confirmed Ms. Chanonat’s point: Only 15 to 20 percent of French students were offered those three classes a year.

“It is clear that many students go through their entire schooling without having benefited from a single lesson,” the report stated

The French feminist philosopher Camille Froidevaux-Metterie said the failure to put sex education in schools reveals a deep social conservatism in France.

“Education about sex, but also about emotional and sexual relations, is learning to respect others and the difference between genders and sexualities,” she said. “And that pushes against a Conservative tradition that has always existed in France.”

The government did keep trying to implement its law, but each time, it was met by fierce opposition, Ms. Froidevaux-Metterie said.

In 2014, after the government trained teachers in 10 school districts to detect gender stereotypes and help children overcome them for a pilot program, some parents organized boycotts and pulled children out of school for two days. Activists who opposed gay marriage said the program would destroy the traditional heterosexual family model and teach children they could choose their gender.

After one teacher was targeted on social media with personal threats, the program was cut, said Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who was the country’s minister of women’s rights at the time.

The same opponents protested and circulated petitions this past fall and winter, opposing teaching on gender identity.

Ludovine de la Rochère, the co-founder of France’s major anti-gay marriage movement in the early 2010s that later led the opposition to the sex education program, told a Catholic radio station the program would introduce to children the possibility of gender transition. Her organization is part of the coalition that has sued to stop the first sex education classes this fall.

The new curriculum, published last month in the official bulletin of the Ministry of Education, focuses on the themes of equality between men and women, the fight against discrimination, the principle of consent, and the prevention of sexism and sexual violence.

Though they consider the curriculum cause for celebration, the activists who have been fighting for it have not withdrawn their lawsuit against the government. Essential to its success, they say, is funding — up to 620 million euros annually, or 52 euros per student, by one estimate, which is about $67 million, or about $56 per student.

So far the education ministry has committed no money.

“We know the implementation will be difficult,” Ms. Durocher said. “It will be a new feminist battle.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed research.

The war in Ukraine is at an inflection point, with President Trump seeking rapprochement with the Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin, and pressing for an end to the fighting.

But for nearly three years before Mr. Trump’s return to power, the United States and Ukraine were joined in an extraordinary partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology whose evolution and inner workings have been known only to a small circle of American and allied officials.

With remarkable transparency, the Pentagon has offered a public accounting of the $66.5 billion in weaponry it has supplied to Ukraine. But a New York Times investigation reveals that America’s involvement in the war was far deeper than previously understood. The secret partnership both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.

Here are five takeaways from the investigation.

A U.S. base in Wiesbaden, Germany, supplied the Ukrainians with the coordinates of Russian forces on their soil.

The idea behind the partnership was that America’s close cooperation with Ukraine would compensate for Russia’s vast advantages in manpower and weaponry. To guide the Ukrainians as they deployed their ever-more-sophisticated arsenal, the Americans created an operation called Task Force Dragon.

The secret center of the partnership was at the U.S. Army garrison in Wiesbaden, Germany. Each morning, U.S. and Ukrainian military officers set targeting priorities — Russian units, pieces of equipment or infrastructure. American and coalition intelligence officers searched satellite imagery, radio emissions and intercepted communications to find Russian positions. Task Force Dragon then gave the Ukrainians the coordinates so they could shoot at them.

Military officials worried that it might be unduly provocative to call the targets “targets.” Instead they were referred to as “points of interest.”

U.S. intelligence and artillery helped Ukraine quickly turn the tide against the Russian invasion.

In spring 2022, the Biden administration agreed to send High Mobility Artillery Systems, or HIMARS, which used satellite-guided rockets for strikes up to 50 miles distant.

In the war’s first year, the Ukrainians were extremely dependent on the Americans for intelligence, and Task Force Dragon vetted and oversaw virtually every HIMARS strike.

The strikes caused Russian casualty rates to soar, and Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensive was largely successful: By December, the Ukrainians held an unlikely, David-versus-Goliath upper hand against their Russian foe.

The Biden administration kept moving its red lines.

From the first, administration officials sought to lay down a red line: America was not fighting Russia; it was helping Ukraine. Still, they worried that steps taken to accomplish that might provoke Mr. Putin to attack N.A.T.O. targets or perhaps make good on his nuclear threats. Even as the administration developed an ever-greater tolerance of risk to help Ukraine meet the evolving threat, many of the most potentially provocative steps were taken in secret.

• Easing a prohibition against American boots on Ukrainian ground, Wiesbaden was allowed to put about a dozen military advisers in Kyiv. To avoid drawing public attention to their presence, the Pentagon initially called them “subject matter experts.” Later the team was expanded, to about three dozen, and the military advisers were eventually allowed to travel to Ukrainian command posts closer to the fighting.

• In 2022, the U.S. Navy was authorized to share targeting information for Ukrainian drone strikes on warships just beyond the territorial waters of Russian-annexed Crimea. The C.I.A. was allowed to support Ukrainian operations within Crimean waters; that fall, the spy agency covertly helped Ukrainian drones strike Russian warships in the port of Sevastopol.

• In January 2024, U.S. and Ukrainian military officers in Wiesbaden jointly planned a campaign — using coalition-supplied long-range missiles, along with Ukrainian drones — to attack about 100 Russian military targets across Crimea. The campaign, named Operation Lunar Hail, largely succeeded in forcing the Russians to pull equipment, facilities and forces in Crimea back to the Russian mainland.

Ultimately, the U.S. military and C.I.A. were allowed to help with strikes into Russia.

The hardest red line was the Russian border. But in spring 2024, to protect the northern city of Kharkiv against a Russian assault, the administration authorized the creation of an “ops box” — a zone of Russian territory within which U.S. officers in Wiesbaden could provide the Ukrainians with precise coordinates. The box’s first iteration extended across a wide swath of Ukraine’s northern border. The box was expanded after North Korea sent troops to help fight the Ukrainians’ incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. The U.S. military was later allowed to enable missile strikes in an area of southern Russia where the Russians staged forces and equipment for their offensive in eastern Ukraine.

Longstanding policy barred the C.I.A. from providing intelligence on targets on Russian soil. But the C.I.A. could request “variances,” carve-outs to support strikes for specific objectives. Intelligence had identified a vast munitions depot in Toropets, 290 miles north of the Ukrainian border. On Sept. 18, 2024, a swarm of drones slammed into the munitions depot. The blast, as powerful as a small earthquake, opened a crater the width of a football field. Later, the C.I.A. was allowed to enable Ukrainian drone strikes in southern Russia to try to slow advances in eastern Ukraine.

Political disagreements in Ukraine contributed to the 2023 counteroffensive’s collapse.

The 2023 counteroffensive was meant to build momentum after the first year’s triumphs. But after the partners held war games in Wiesbaden and agreed on a strategy, the plan ran headlong into Ukrainian politics.

The Ukrainian armed forces chief, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, embraced the plan, whose centerpiece was an assault in the direction of the southern city of Melitopol that would cut off Russian supply lines. But his rival and subordinate, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, had his own plan — to impale Russian forces in the occupied eastern city of Bakhmut. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, sided with him and divided up the ammunition and forces between two main fronts instead of one. The Ukrainians never did reclaim Bakhmut, and within months, the counteroffensive ended in failure. Russia now had the upper hand.

When she finds it hard to focus, Nilab jots down her worries on slips of paper and pins them to her wall, a strategy she picked up in a seminar on mental health at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul.

She makes a mental note to deal with the issues at a scheduled time and then gets back to studying. That kept her sane when the U.S.-backed Afghan government was overthrown in 2021, when the Taliban made it illegal for women to receive an education and when she left in July 2023 to study at the university’s campus-in-exile in Qatar.

Now, in Nilab’s dorm room in Doha, the little notes are stacking up. The Trump administration’s shutdown of foreign aid and refugee admissions has left her terrified that she will be forced to return to Afghanistan.

There, she would be alone and deprived of any rights as a woman. Her hard-earned American-style education would be all but worthless.

She imagines the worst. “How can girls go back to Afghanistan?” said Nilab, 30, who asked that only her first name be used to protect her identity. “What will happen to us? Rape, forced marriage and death.”

On Jan. 20, just as Nilab was planning her final project for her cybersecurity degree, President Trump signed an executive order suspending refugee resettlement. The U.S. government had promised refugee status for her and her classmates, but Nilab’s hopes of rejoining her family, who received asylum in the United States after the Taliban took over, were shattered.

A month later, her university lost most of its funding when Mr. Trump dismantled American foreign aid programs, to reorient spending in line with the administration’s foreign policy goals. Funding was partly restored on March 16, the university’s administration said, but only enough to operate into June. If the university closes, students will lose their housing, cafeteria meal plans and Qatari student visas.

A third thunderbolt came on March 15, with word that Mr. Trump was considering putting Afghanistan on a list of countries whose citizens would be barred from entering the United States. Nilab does not know when she will ever see her family again, much less resettle with them.

As she and other Afghan students find their lives thrown into chaos, they are caught between the infinite possibilities promised by a university education and a crushing sense that there are no doors left to open.

“I thought this long journey was finished,” she said. “I was wrong.”

With midterms approaching, Nilab has little time for her concerns. She has a presentation on arrays and algorithms due soon.

So she writes down her fears and pins them to her bulletin board.

Piece of America

The American University of Afghanistan was established in 2006 as a coed liberal arts college, with instruction in English. It was designed to educate the next generation of Afghan leaders and innovators, imbued with Western ideals of justice, freedom and democracy. Students called their campus “Little America.”

The U.S. government has invested more than $100 million in the university, and until last month, funding from the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., covered more than half of its operating costs.

(The agency has also provided scholarships for more than 100 Afghan women — including Nilab’s sister — to study at universities in Oman and Qatar, among them the American University, and those students face a similar budget freeze.)

When the American military hastily withdrew from the country in August 2021 and the Taliban returned to power, the American University was an obvious target. Militants rampaged through its buildings, scrawling graffiti that derided students as “U.S.-trained infidel spies” and “wolves in sheep’s skin.”

Administrators worked to get more than 1,000 students out of the country as quickly as possible. Nearly 700 were evacuated to sister universities in Iraq, Kazakhstan and the United States.

The government of Qatar agreed to host a temporary campus-in-exile. One hundred students arrived for the term starting in August 2022, and another 100 — Nilab’s group — landed a year later.

Most of the students eventually left for the United States on so-called Priority 1 visas. When Mr. Trump took office in January, the remaining 35 were waiting for their final interviews and pre-departure medical checkups. Some already had airplane tickets.

They now wander the near-empty halls of their temporary campus in a stunned daze, not knowing what will happen next.

“We thought all our traumas were finally coming to an end, so we could start to breathe again,” said Waheeda Babakarkhail, 23, a programmer who dreams of working as a white hat hacker, testing computer programs for security flaws.

“I had accepted that I couldn’t stay in Afghanistan,” she said, “but now even the future I thought I would have has been lost.”

Aspirations have been derailed across the campus. Abbas Ahmadzai, 24, a business major, had a job in event management lined up in New York. Faisel Popalzai, 23, was hoping to get a job at Microsoft. He developed an A.I.-assisted computer program that can identify potentially fraudulent financial transactions. The app, called Hawks.Ai, won the Microsoft Hackathon last year in Doha.

He said it made no sense for the United States to slam its doors shut.

“Trump complains that the Americans left valuable military equipment behind when they left Afghanistan,” Mr. Popalzai said. “Well, he’s about to leave another valuable investment behind: our minds, paid for by the American people.”

Sense of Dread

If the university is forced to close in June, the students face an alarming prospect.

They will lose their student visas and their right to stay in Qatar within weeks. If they cannot find a Qatari employer to sponsor them, or obtain a job or scholarship offer in another country, they will have to return to Afghanistan.

They are keenly aware that “the way we were educated is in contradiction to everything the Taliban represent,” said Hashmatullah Rahimi, 24, a business major. “We were taught to speak freely, to be independent. Not a single person in the Taliban government wants that.”

The university’s administrators say there has been no documented persecution of its graduates since the Taliban takeover. But students fear they would be viewed as a threat.

“If we go back,” Mr. Popalzai said, “they will label us as spies, sent to infect Afghans against the Taliban with our American ideology.”

For female students, the risks are obvious. The Taliban have banned education for women and girls after sixth grade and barred women from most forms of employment. They cannot travel without a male relative, they are required to cover their faces outside the home, and their voices must not be heard in public.

“Maybe we won’t be killed if we go back,” said Rawina Amiri, 24, a business major who dreams of becoming a professional volleyball player.

“Does that mean we should accept having our rights violated?” she added. “We have the right to learn, to contribute, to work. Do people in the United States expect us to give up those rights because the Americans promised us a visa, then changed their mind?”

Nilab remains in limbo in the U.S. visa process. On Tuesday, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel ruled that the Trump administration must admit thousands of people granted refugee status before Jan. 20, which could include several of the university’s students. But the ruling is preliminary and could be reversed.

What has really thrown Nilab for a loop is the potential for Afghans to be included in a travel ban.

She has not seen her parents and younger siblings since they moved to Northern Virginia. They were granted asylum because her parents had worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan. But because she was an adult, she was not eligible to join them.

Nilab tries to hold on to hope, relying on the coping skills she picked up as a freshman four years ago. She is applying for scholarships in Europe even as she studies for her exams.

“The Quran says that when one door is shut, another opens,” she said. “But if you don’t knock, the doors won’t open.”

The Israeli military launched airstrikes in the southern outskirts of Beirut on Friday for the first time since a U.S.-brokered cease-fire came into effect in November, shattering months of tense calm in the Lebanese capital and stoking fears of a further escalation.

The bombardment came after rockets were fired at northern Israel from Lebanese territory earlier in the day, setting off air-raid sirens in three communities near the border. The Israeli military subsequently ordered residents of the densely populated Hadath neighborhood of Dahiya, an area on the southern edges of Beirut, to evacuate from the vicinity of a building there.

Less than two hours later, the airstrikes began.

The Israeli military said it had targeted a site that stored Hezbollah’s drones, but did not explicitly blame the Lebanese militant group for the rocket fire earlier in the day. Hezbollah denied any involvement in the attack on Israel and said it remained committed to the cease-fire.

But this was the second such exchange of fire in less than a week, prompting fears that the truce between Israel and Hezbollah could unravel. At least three people were killed in separate Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon on Friday, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The Lebanese military said it was investigating who had fired the rockets. Hezbollah, which is struggling to recover from the devastating 14-month conflict with Israel, has little desire to risk reigniting a conflict, according to experts.

But Palestinian armed groups like Hamas also maintain a sizable presence in Lebanon, operating mostly from decades-old refugee camps. During the war in Gaza, these groups have intermittently launched rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel.

After the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack ignited the war in Gaza, Hezbollah began firing rockets and drones at Israeli positions in solidarity with its Palestinian ally. After nearly a year of low-level violence, the fighting escalated into full-scale war and an Israeli ground invasion before the two sides agreed to a cease-fire.

It marked Lebanon’s deadliest and most destructive conflict since the country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.

Despite the truce, Israeli forces have regularly attacked in southern and eastern Lebanon, leading Hezbollah to accuse Israel of breaking the cease-fire. But Dahiya, which is traditionally a bastion of support for Hezbollah, had not been targeted since the cease-fire went into effect.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said that the country was determined to “strongly enforce” the cease-fire, which obligated the Lebanese government to prevent militant groups from attacking Israel from its territory.

“The equation has changed,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “We will not allow firing at our communities — not even a trickle.”

After the Israeli military issued the evacuation warnings, surveillance drones began to whir above Beirut and gunfire erupted in the Dahiya as residents attempted to alert neighbors to an imminent Israeli strike. The Lebanese authorities also ordered all schools in the area to close, and parents rushed to collect screaming children. Students who spoke to The New York Times reported being ordered by teachers to move away from the windows, and said their classmates broke down in fear.

The pandemonium was reminiscent of the most intense days of the war, when Israeli airstrikes pounded Beirut’s southern outskirts on a near daily basis.

“People are panicking,” said Elie Hachem, the director of the St. Therese hospital, about 600 meters from the targeted building. “I can hear cars honking like crazy outside on the street.”

The hospital, which had been badly damaged in the war, was left unscathed by the strike, but casualties soon began arriving into the emergency room, said Mr. Hachem.

Air-raid sirens warning of incoming rocket fire had rung out earlier on Friday in northern Israel, including in the city of Kiryat Shmona. The Israeli military later said one of the projectiles was intercepted and another fell inside Lebanese territory.

Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, ordered the country’s security forces to arrest those responsible for the rocket fire, calling it “irresponsible” and a threat to “Lebanon’s stability and security,” according to a statement.

The Lebanese government is distinct from Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia and political party that wielded enormous influence in Lebanon before the war. The new government has pledged to bring all weapons under the state’s control — including Hezbollah’s — but it remains unclear exactly when and how they will do that.

The U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, called for restraint, warning that a “a return to wider conflict in Lebanon would be devastating.”

Hwaida Saad and Dayana Iwaza contributed reporting from Beirut.

For months, French businesses have been bracing for the fallout of trade wars and tariff threats from the United States as the effects of President Trump’s “America First” policies ripple out. But this past week, the French corporate world was roiled by another type of Trump missive.

In a terse three-paragraph letter sent by the American Embassy in France to French companies, executives were told that President Trump’s moves to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies would apply to any firm doing business with the U.S. government. It said it was giving them five days to sign a form indicating that they would comply.

An executive order that Mr. Trump signed the day after taking office instructs federal contractors not to engage in D.E.I., which the order described as “illegal discrimination.” The letter to French businesses said the order “applies to all suppliers and contractors of the U.S. government, regardless of their nationality and the country in which they operate.”

“If you do not agree to sign this document, we would appreciate it if you could provide detailed reasons, which we will forward to our legal services,” the letter said. The accompanying form added that companies must certify “that they do not operate any programs promoting D.E.I.”

The notice caused a sensation in the French corporate world and drew a curt reply from the French government.

“This practice reflects the values ​​of the new American government. They are not ours,” the economy ministry said in a statement late Friday. France’s economy minister, Eric Lombard, “will remind his counterparts within the American government of this,” the statement said.

It was not immediately clear how many companies received the letter or how enforceable it was. But several members of the French Association of Private Enterprises, which include French CAC-40 listed companies and dozens of other major French firms, expressed their dismay over it during a meeting with French government officials this week.

Mr. Trump’s D.E.I.-quashing orders have sown fear and confusion among corporate leaders in the United States and led companies such as Google, as well as American law firms and some universities, to roll back diversity goals. But the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its policies on Europe-based workforces have been met with resistance in places like Italy that have long had strong labor laws favoring workers’ rights.

In France, companies have worked for years to increase the presence of women, members of minority groups and employees with disabilities, generally broadening their workforces to reflect the makeup of French society.

Unlike in the United States, French diversity policies officially bar the consideration of race in hiring. Even so, French companies have moved in practice to increase employee diversity and communicate their efforts to shareholders. In addition, companies with more than 250 employees are legally required to have more than 40 percent of women on their executive boards.

A spokesperson for the French Association of Private Enterprises said the group was waiting for the government to make a “coordinated response” to the Trump administration’s letter.

Catherine Porter contributed reporting.

Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Shara, announced late Saturday the formation of a caretaker government that will lead the country through a crucial transition as it emerges from more than 50 years of dictatorship under the Assad family’s iron-fisted rule.

Mr. al-Shara, who led the coalition of rebel forces that overthrew the Assad regime, appointed a bevy of new ministers, swearing in each before an audience of several hundred dignitaries in a brightly lit hall in the presidential palace on a hill above Damascus.

His government included some experienced officials, and one woman — but he appointed close allies to the important ministries of defense, foreign affairs and interior.

The rebels who ousted President Bashar al-Assad in December have since been acting as Syria’s de facto authorities. Mr. al-Shara was named interim president and oversaw a transitional government.

Among Mr. al-Shara’s early promises was to form a caretaker government by March that would run the country until elections can be held. He has said that it could take up to four years to hold elections because the country is in disarray.

The makeup of the new government announced on Saturday, including key cabinet positions, was widely seen as a litmus test for whether Mr. al-Shara would extend any real power beyond his tight-knit circle of allies and make good on his pledge to create an inclusive government that represents all of Syria’s disparate religious and ethnic groups.

The caretaker government will be in power for five years, allowing for a permanent constitution to be adopted and elections to be held, as detailed in an interim constitution adopted this month.

The announcement on Saturday suggested that Mr. al-Shara was partially bowing to pressure from Syrian society and minority groups, as well as to demands from foreign governments that are considering lifting sanctions.

In a clear nod to those critics, Mr. al-Shara replaced his brother as minister of health, and appointed two popular activists to lead ministries. Raed al-Saleh, the head of the White Helmets civil defense organization, was made minister of disasters and emergencies, and Hind Kabawat, who helped organize a recent national dialogue conference, was named minister of social affairs — the lone woman appointee.

And in an important gesture to the country’s Kurdish minority, Mr. al-Shara appointed a Kurd as minister of education, a ministry that will be closely watched for how it handles the rewriting of the Assad regime’s education system.

Many Arab and Western leaders have said the restoration of full ties with Syria’s new government — including relief from punishing Western sanctions — would happen only if a political process that reflected the country’s ethnic and religious diversity was created.

While leading the transitional authority, Mr. al-Shara had placed allies in key government positions, effectively transplanting the provincial administration he once led in the rebel-held city of Idlib.

The announcement of the new government comes a month after Mr. al-Shara convened a conference for Syrians from across the country to share input and recommendations for an interim administration.

Pressure on Mr. al-Shara to make changes to his government grew at home and abroad after violence in Syria’s coastal region this month. Clashes erupted between remnants of the Assad regime and government security forces. More than 1,000 people were killed, many of them civilians, according to the war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Mr. al-Shara has also secured important agreements with the Kurdish-led militia, which is backed by the United States and controls much of northeastern Syria, and with Druse leaders in the south of the country.

The constitutional declaration that was announced this month was drawn up by a committee of experts led by a constitutional law professor. It retains the strong presidential system, granting executive power to the president and the power to appoint judges of the Supreme Court and a third of the members of parliament.

But it also set out a separation of branches of government and an independent judiciary that is “subject only to the law,” representing a break from the authoritarian state run by Mr. al-Assad.

The constitutional declaration also keeps a stipulation from the old constitution that the president must be a Muslim. It also guarantees freedom of opinion, expression, information, publication and press.

Some groups have criticized the temporary constitution for not recognizing Syria’s range of ethnic and religious groups or laying out a system of power sharing. But other analysts and democracy activists have described it as a good interim document that would maintain stability and allow time to debate further changes.

Ibrahim Draji, a law professor at Damascus University, said recently in a public discussion in the city that a three-month limit for a state of emergency and other restrictions on the military and security services were new safeguards against a return to dictatorship.

But another lawyer at the event, Faeq Huaiji, a co-founder of a Syrian nongovernmental organization, the Equal Citizenship Center, raised several concerns, including that the temporary constitution did not provide for adequate checks on the president.

Muhammad Haj Kadour contributed reporting.