The Catholic priest stood at the altar in the hilltop church for the mass baptism, dunking dozens of heads in water and tracing a cross with his finger on each forehead.

Then he rejoiced at Christianity’s recovery of souls in a land where the vast majority of people are Muslim — as the men, women and children standing before him had been.

The ceremony was one of many in recent months in Kosovo, a formerly Serbian territory inhabited largely by ethnic Albanians that declared itself an independent state in 2008. In a census last spring, 93 percent of the population professed itself Muslim and only 1.75 percent Roman Catholic.

A small number of ethnic Albanian Christian activists, all converts from Islam, are urging their ethnic kin to look to the church as an expression of their identity. They call it the “return movement,” a push to revive a pre-Islamic past they see as an anchor of Kosovo’s place in Europe and a barrier to religious extremism spilling over from the Middle East.

Until the Ottoman Empire conquered what is today Kosovo and other areas of the Balkans in the 14th century, bringing with it Islam, ethnic Albanians were primarily Catholics. Under Ottoman rule, which lasted until 1912, most of Kosovo’s people switched faiths.

By reversing that process, said Father Fran Kolaj, the priest who carried out the baptisms outside the village of Llapushnik, ethnic Albanians can recover their original identity.

Ethnic Albanians, who trace their roots to an ancient people called the Illyrians, live mainly in Albania, a country on the Adriatic Sea. But they also make up a large majority of the population in neighboring Kosovo and more than a quarter of the population in North Macedonia.

At the church where the baptisms took place, nationalist emblems jostle with religious iconography. The double-headed eagle symbol of Albania decorates the steeple and also a screen behind the altar.

“It is time for us to return to the place where we belong — with Christ,” Father Fran Kolaj said in an interview.

In many Muslim lands, renouncing Islam can bring severe punishment, sometimes even death. So far, the baptism ceremonies taking place in Kosovo have stirred no violent opposition, though there have been some angry denunciations online. (It is not known how many conversions have so far taken place.)

But historians, who agree that Christianity was present in Kosovo long before the Ottoman Empire brought Islam, question the thinking behind the movement.

“From a historical perspective what they say is true,” said Durim Abdullahu, a historian at the University of Pristina. But, he added, “their logic means that we should all become pagans” because the people living on the territory of today’s Kosovo before the arrival of Christianity and later Islam were nonbelievers.

Like many other Kosovars, Mr. Abdullahu said he believed that Serbia, which has a mostly Orthodox Christian population, had helped stoke the return movement as a way of sowing discord in Kosovo. While Serbia has long been accused of undermining Kosovo’s stability, there is no evidence it has been promoting the conversions.

Archaeologists in 2022 uncovered the remains of a sixth-century Roman church near Pristina, and in 2023 found a mosaic with an inscription indicating that early Albanians, or at least a people perhaps related to them, were Christians.

Still, Christophe Goddard, a French archaeologist working at the site, said it was wrong to impose modern concepts of nation and ethnicity on ancient peoples. “This is not history but modern politics,” he said.

Traces of Kosovo’s distant pre-Islamic past also survived in a small number of families that clung to Roman Catholicism despite the risk of being ostracized by their Muslim neighbors.

Marin Sopi, 67, a retired Albanian language teacher who was baptized 16 years ago, said his family had been “closet Catholics” for generations. In childhood, he recalled, he and his family observed Ramadan with Muslim friends but secretly celebrated Christmas at home.

“We were Muslims during the day and Christians at night,” he said. Since coming out as a Christian, he said, 36 members of his extended family have formally abandoned Islam.

Islam and Christianity in Kosovo mostly coexisted in peace — until Orthodox Christian soldiers and nationalist paramilitary gangs from Serbia began torching mosques and expelling Muslims from the homes in the 1990s.

Foreign Christian missionaries have kept their distance from Kosovo’s conversion campaign. But some ethnic Albanians living in Western Europe have offered support, seeing a return to Catholicism as Kosovo’s best hope of one day entering the European Union, a largely Christian club.

Arber Gashi, an ethnic Albanian living in Switzerland, traveled to Kosovo to attend the baptism ceremony at the church in Llapushnik, which overlooks the scene of a major battle in 1998 between Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army.

He and other activists worry that funding for mosque-building and other activities from Turkey and countries in the Middle East like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with their more conservative approaches, threatens Kosovo’s traditionally laid-back form of Islam. Most of this money has gone into economic development projects unrelated to religion.

The center of Pristina has a statue honoring Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize laureate of Albanian descent, and is dominated by a large Roman Catholic cathedral built after the war with Serbia. But Turkey is currently funding the construction nearby of a giant new mosque that will be even bigger.

Mr. Gashi also said that he feared a return of the Islamic extremism that emerged in Kosovo’s first, chaotic decade of independence. By some counts, Kosovo provided more recruits to the Islamic State in Syria than any other European country.

Christianity, on the other hand, would open a path to Europe, he said.

A crackdown by the authorities in recent years has silenced extremism and reinforced Kosovo’s traditionally relaxed take on Islam. The streets of Pristina are lined with bars serving a wide range of alcohol. Veiled women are extremely rare.

Gezim Gjin Hajrullahu, 57, a teacher who was among those baptized recently in Llapushnik, said he had joined the Catholic church “not for the sake of religion itself” but for the “sake of our national identity” as ethnic Albanians. His wife also converted.

Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian prime minister, Albin Kurti, in an interview in Pristina, played down the importance of religion to Albanian identity. “For us, religions came and went but we are still here,” he said. “For Albanians, in terms of identity, religion was never of first importance.”

That sets them apart from other peoples in the now vanished, multiethnic federal state of Yugoslavia, which disintegrated during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. The main warring parties in the early phases of the conflict spoke much the same language and looked similar but were clearly distinguished from each other by religion — Serbs by Orthodox Christianity, Croats by Roman Catholicism and Bosnians by Islam.

Activists in the return movement believe that ethnic Albanians also need to cement their national loyalties with religion in the form of Roman Catholicism.

Boik Breca, a former Muslim active in the movement, insisted that the Catholic church is not an alien intrusion but the true expression of Albanian identity and evidence that Kosovo belongs in Europe.

He said his interest in Christianity began when Kosovo, along with Serbia, was still part of Yugoslavia. He was sent to jail off the coast of Croatia as a political prisoner. Many of his fellow inmates were Catholics, he recalled, and helped stir what he now sees as his true faith and a belief that “our ancestors were all Catholics.”

“To be a true Albanian,” he said, “you have to be Christian.”

This view is widely disputed, including by Mr. Kurti, the prime minister.

“I don’t buy that,” he said.

The current push against Islam began with a meeting in October 2023 in Decani, a bastion of nationalist sentiment near Kosovo’s border with Albania. The gathering, attended by nationalist intellectuals and former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters, discussed ways to promote “Albanian-ness” and decided that Christianity would help.

“We are no longer Muslims as of today,” attendees said, adopting the slogan: “To be only Albanians.”

The meeting led to the formation of what was initially called the Movement for the Abandonment of the Islamic Faith, a provocative name since largely dropped in favor of the “Movement of Return.”

From his office in Pristina, decorated with a model of Mecca, Kosovo’s grand mufti, Naim Ternava, has watched the return movement with anxiety and dismay. The push for Muslims to switch to Christianity, he said, risked disrupting religious harmony and was being used by “foreign agents to spread hatred of Islam.”

“Our mission,” he added, “is to keep people in our religion. I tell people to remain in Islam.”

For centuries in Morlaix, a city of cobblestones and creperies on the Breton coast of France, the best-known dealers were the ones who traded in linen during the Renaissance and built a number of unique half-timbered houses in the middle of town.

The new dealers are another story.

France, long a major European market for illicit drugs, is experiencing a new eruption of concern over its domestic drug trade, and the violence that often accompanies it. In the past few years, experts say, the trade in illicit drugs has become more noticeable in France’s small and medium-size cities, bringing a measure of insecurity to places that had once felt sleepy and safe. Morlaix, with its population of about 15,000, is among them.

“We are confronting a tide of cocaine — a new thing,” said Jean-Paul Vermot, the mayor.

On a recent morning, Mr. Vermot gave a tour of Morlaix, pointing with pride to its quaint marina, the City Hall balcony where Gen. Charles de Gaulle delivered a speech in July 1945 and the 18th-century tobacco factory that has been transformed into a cultural center.

He also showed the park bench where, he said, a group of young dealers three years ago threatened to kill him and burn down his house. He showed a public housing complex where he said drug deals were recently made in the open before a police crackdown. He showed a door of a residence still riddled with bullet holes, a recent effort by a group of young dealers to intimidate another young man in debt to them.

Faced with what has been called the “simultaneous explosion” of supply and demand for illegal drugs, French officials nationwide are embracing proposals to crack down on traffickers. Conservative politicians have taken to blaming casual consumers, including marijuana smokers, for supporting a deadly industry at a time when some governments in the Americas and Europe have decriminalized or legalized cannabis.

Whether it all amounts to a new French war on drugs remains to be seen, given the country’s bout of political instability. France’s center-right national government collapsed last month after bitter disagreements over the 2025 budget. A new government, of a roughly similar political bent, was announced just before Christmas.

Its interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, is a holdover from the previous one and a tough-talking architect of the proposed antidrug plan. Its justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, recently said he wanted to put the 100 biggest drug dealers who are currently incarcerated in solitary confinement, “as one does with the terrorists.”

It is clear that any future conversation about drug policy will not be limited to the traditional hot spots in the suburbs of Paris or in Marseille, France’s second-largest city and a legendary bastion of organized crime.

Now, more than ever, the talk is of drugs in “La France profonde,” or “deep France,” those slower-paced places where some essential part of the nation’s soul is believed to reside. In May, a French Senate report found that “the intensification of trafficking in the rural areas and the moderate-sized cities” had been “accompanied by an outbreak of violence particularly spectacular and worrying, sometimes making citizens experience veritable war scenes.”

Mr. Retailleau has said that French drug trafficking has the country on the verge of “Mexicanization,” a phrase that appears to imply a loss of government control over public safety, the corruption of public officials and the increasing prominence of drug gangs in public life. Some experts consider the language to be exaggerated. But many acknowledge that a number of harrowing episodes far beyond the big cities are a new cause for concern.

In October, a 5-year-old child was shot twice in Pacé, a small town near Rennes, during a drug-related car chase. In November, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the head during a drug-gang shootout in Poitiers, a city of 90,000 people in the center-west of France.

Le Parisien newspaper reported last month that five people had been identified as suspects in an armed kidnapping of a 77-year-old woman in June in Trévoux, a town of 7,000 people north of Lyon, as part a drug-related extortion scheme targeting her son.

All of these episodes have been dwarfed by the recent trouble in Marseille, the old Mediterranean port gripped of late by gangland turf battles that have claimed scores of lives in the past three years, and have seen the rise of a generation of teenage contract killers.

In November in Marseille, Mr. Retailleau and the justice minister at the time, Didier Migaud, who leans left, laid out plans to fight the drug war. Among them was a proposal for a national prosecutors’ office and special courts dedicated to organized crime; additional police officers; and the appointment of a new “liaison magistrate” in Bogotá, Colombia.

But in a visit to Rennes after the shooting of the 5-year-old, Mr. Retailleau also laid some of the blame on users: “You who smoke joints, who take rails of coke,” he said, “it has the taste of tears and, above all, of blood.”

A wide range of illicit drugs is available in France, but cannabis and cocaine dominate. Lawmakers find the latter particularly troublesome.

In France, and in Europe generally, cocaine trafficking began to take off in the late 1980s, when the drug market in the United States became saturated, and U.S. officials began cracking down more severely on cocaine. A European Union Drugs Agency report from last year noted that European seizures of cocaine now exceeded those made by the United States.

Jérôme Durain, a French senator who is an author of the Senate report and president of a Senate investigative commission on narcotics trafficking, said the spread of the drug trade to smaller towns was the inevitable result of big-city gangs seeking to expand into new markets. Technology has helped, he said, with the rise of “Uberization,” which allows people in the countryside to order drugs with cellphones.

“It’s like how 30 years ago, when I was young, there were McDonald’s in Paris,” Mr. Durain said in an interview. “Now you have them everywhere.”

Mr. Vermot, the mayor of Morlaix, said harder drugs had become more prevalent there. Recent police surveillance of a known dealing site, he said, identified users from all walks of life. “Heads of businesses, workers, functionaries, artisans and people living on the margins — we truly had the whole range of society who came to buy, with this new phenomenon of the presence of cocaine,” he said.

Mr. Vermot noted that Morlaix’s public housing was well cared for and well integrated into neighborhoods with wealthier residents. This is not the case in some of France’s biggest cities, where poor people clustered in the banlieues, or suburbs, can feel cut off from the center of town and the economic mainstream.

In a close-knit city, he said, this also means that he is quick to hear complaints from neighbors.

“Living together actually allows us to mitigate, to lessen, to avoid a certain number of social problems,” he said, including when young dealers start trouble.

Morlaix is far from a city paralyzed by crime. In a country that strictly limits access to guns, its problems can seem almost quaint by American standards. Its residents are aware of the problem, but not everyone supports a crackdown.

Aurélien Cariou, 48, a night watchman, said he suspected that the proposed drug policies were an expression of prejudice against racial minorities, who tend to live in France’s poorer neighborhoods. Getting tough on cannabis, in particular, he said, seemed like an excuse “to knock the heads of Moroccans and Algerians.”

Daniel Ricoul, 55, the owner of a cosmetics store in the town center, said the government needed to address delinquency with a heavier hand. “It’s necessary to be firm,” he said.

Mr. Durain, the senator, is, like the mayor, a member of the Socialist Party. He said he had spoken to a number of left-leaning mayors around the country who agree with many of the proposed changes to the system because they know there is a problem. If there is buy-in for the proposals from the left and the right, it could give a pending drug-fighting bill legs in a badly polarized legislature that cannot seem to agree on much else.

Mr. Vermot, the mayor, said that some of the city’s problems had subsided with a recent wave of arrests. But he knows he is in for a long-term struggle. He said he liked some of the ideas that would give law enforcement more tools to go after dealers and traffickers. But he is worried that conservatives seeking to rein in France’s ballooning debt will cut social programs that serve to keep drug-world trouble in check.

Still, he said: “We have to be honest. It’s a problem. And we have to continue to confront it.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.

The cardboard box was light, barely big enough to hold a baby, much less an athletic 26-year-old. Yet, it held Diego Fernando Aguirre Pantaleón, or at least his remains, excavated from a common grave in a desert in northern Mexico.

His family does not know how he ended up in the grave in Coahuila state. The authorities said he was abducted in 2011 on graduation day with six other classmates, all promising recruits for a new specialized police force trained to combat organized crime in Coahuila. Armed men had broken into the bar where the young police officers were celebrating and taken them away.

“We were dead in life, all of us,” Mr. Aguirre Pantaleón’s father, Miguel Ángel Aguirre, 66, said of his family. After his son disappeared, he would sleep on the living room sofa, waiting to hear his son’s footsteps.

It took 12 years — until February 2023 — for his son’s remains to return home in a box. His parents refused to look inside. Scientists told them his body had been burned.

It was a tragic yet uncommon resolution in a country where more than 120,000 people have vanished since the 1950s, according to government data, leaving relatives desperate for clues about their fate. Until recently, hundreds of families in Coahuila had faced the same uncertainty. But in a unique partnership, search volunteers, scientists and state officials set out to change that.

From that alliance emerged a specialized research institute — the Regional Center for Human Identification — the first of its kind in the country. It has an almost impossible task: Find the remains of the missing and send them back home.

“Dignity and human rights do not end with death,” said Yezka Garza, the general coordinator of the center based in Saltillo, an industrial city nestled in the Coahuila desert. “What we seek is for those bodies not to be forgotten again.”

The center, built next to Saltillo’s morgues, opened in 2020, supported by funds from the state government, Mexico’s federal search commission and the U.S. Agency for International Development. It has about 50 staff members — families of the missing had requested that several of them be recent graduates, seeing their young age as a sign that they had not been corrupted.

They work to find, unearth, classify, store and identify human remains nearly every day.

Since 2021, researchers have recovered 1,521 unclaimed, unidentified or undiscovered human remains from large-scale searches in state morgues, common graves and clandestine burial sites. Through genetic and forensic analysis, they have put names to 130 of those bodies, most of which, 115, were returned to families.

Many of the dead were most likely the victims of the severe violence Coahuila state endured at the hands of the Los Zetas cartel and the security forces that colluded with them, with homicides peaking in 2012. Although the cartel’s hold on Coahuila has since weakened and the state is now one of Mexico’s most peaceful, more than 3,600 people remain missing there.

The memories of shootings, disappearances and bodies hanging from bridges remain fresh for residents to this day.

“Many of my friends from high school went astray and got into organized crime,” said Alan Herrera, 27, a lawyer and searcher with the center. “They lasted a month and they killed them — 12-, 13-year-old kids.”

Mr. Herrera’s soothing voice is helpful in his line of work: making first contact with people searching for loved ones. In November, he visited the home of Jorge Bretado, 65, in Torreón, another industrial city west of Saltillo. The men sat in a cramped living room, and an interview unfolded.

Whom was he looking for? His son and his ex-wife.

What happened? Municipal police officers took them away in 2010; he never saw them again.

Did he file a police report? “No,” Mr. Bretado replied nervously. Back then, the cartel, not the law, ruled. “And they told us that they would kill the whole family if we made the report,” he said.

“I wholeheartedly hope your relatives are not with us,” Mr. Herrera said after the interview.

He then put on blue gloves and pricked Mr. Bretado’s finger to collect his blood, which researchers would use to match with DNA in their ever-growing database. If his son’s body was in one of the center’s refrigerated cabinets, Mr. Bretado would hear from him.

It’s not always easy to identify victims’ remains in Coahuila — the Zetas made sure of that. The cartel’s goal, said Mónica Suárez, the center’s lead forensic geneticist, was to make sure “there was absolutely nothing left of the person.”

If there are remains, they are often bone fragments, darkened by flames or eaten by acid. Anthropologists spend months trying to arrange them like a jigsaw puzzle. For a geneticist, those fragments, too small or degraded to have intact DNA, are not useful.

Mr. Aguirre Pantaleón’s family is among hundreds in Coahuila to get some form of closure.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Aguirre and his wife, Blanca Estela Pantaleón, 61, visited their son’s crypt in a church in Saltillo. “I do think it was a miracle that we found him,” she said, placing a hand over the cold stone engraved with her son’s name. “Here in Mexico, they hardly find anybody.”

When Silvia Yaber heard that the remains of Mr. Aguirre Pantaleón had been found in a common grave, she wondered if her nephew, Víctor Hugo Espinoza Yaber, another police graduate abducted the same night, could also be there. She asked scientists to exhume the remains and sample the DNA of seven relatives, including Mr. Espinoza Yaber’s mother, her sister, who had died of kidney failure.

“I never stopped looking for him,” said Ms. Yaber, 66. She even went to cartel hide-outs and scoured the hills for any sign of her nephew. In August, she got news of a genetic match. The remains of her nephew had been dug up from the same grave.

On a recent day, Ms. Yaber, carrying two bouquets of flowers, went to a cemetery in Saltillo. She put the flowers on her family’s gravesite. Cement had been used to seal it again — this time with Mr. Espinoza Yaber’s remains inside.

“Your son is here now,” she remembers saying to her late sister when she had his remains added to the burial site.

Afterward, she had asked prosecutors to close the case. “It’s not justice,” she said, sitting on the grave and lighting a cigarette. “But I found him, I buried him — and that’s it for me.”

Elsewhere in Coahuila, the search for the missing continues.

Patrocinio, a vast expanse of desert about an hour east of Torreón, has become the focal point for the latest efforts, led by volunteers and scientists. Among the sand dunes, bushes and mesquite shrubs, Los Zetas members had burned victims and dug hundreds, if not thousands, of graves, searchers and families believe.

For two continuous weeks in November, a large group of archaeologists, prosecutors and relatives of the missing came to Patrocinio to unearth as many remains as they could find.

Here, death smells like diesel. A whiff of it signals you’ve come across a clandestine grave, said Ada Flores Netro, an archaeologist with the identification center who was overseeing her colleagues’ work in a freshly dug hole, where they would later unearth rusty handcuffs and bone fragments.

Most unmarked burial sites here are typically found near large shrubs, Ms. Flores Netro said: Cartel members apparently sought shade as they burned and buried their victims.

But volunteer searchers with years of experience and training — not scientists with sophisticated equipment like drones and thermal cameras — had discovered most of the recently found clandestine graves, said Rocío Hernández Romero, 45, a member of the Grupo Vida search collective who was looking for her brother Felipe.

Ms. Hernández Romero had found at least five burial sites in previous days. Her technique is more “rudimentary,” she explained, kneeling near a thorny brush and dragging a spatula along the ground to detect coloration changes or other disturbances.

“The dirt itself,” she said, “sometimes it speaks to you.”

Sheltering from the sun under a tent, a geophysicist, Isabel García, said the constant dialogue with searchers like Ms. Hernández Romero had taught her how to look for better clues about burial sites.

“We couldn’t do anything without them,” said Ms. García, 28.

Then she flew a huge drone equipped with cameras to map the graves uncovered that day.

A few feet away was an area dotted with holes in the ground where archaeologists and volunteer searchers last year unearthed the remains of Sandra Yadira Puente Barraza, 19. She and a friend went missing in 2008 after police officers stopped the taxi in which they had been traveling to go shopping.

When DNA tests matched Ms. Puente Barraza’s remains, her mother, another searcher, left a wooden cross with pink plastic roses at the spot where she was found.

“That was a rough day,” said Silvia Ortiz, leader of the search collective, while sifting buckets of dirt through a mesh to pick out bones and teeth. “It feels good in the sense that you found her. But it hurts so much.”

When he sleeps, Nooh al-Shaghnobi, a rescue worker in Gaza, is haunted by the cries of those he could not save.

The memories of the past 14 months come flooding back, nightmares of collapsed buildings with no equipment to dig out survivors.

“We hear the voices of the people under the rubble,” he said in an interview between rescue calls. “Imagine there are people under the rubble who we know are alive, but we can’t save them. We have to leave them to die.”

For more than a year now, Gaza’s rescue workers, paramedics and ambulance drivers have toiled on the front lines of the war, racing to the sites of countless Israeli airstrikes to try to save those who survived and recover the bodies of those who did not. In the war’s first seven weeks alone, Israel fired nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza, unleashing one of the most intense bombing campaigns in contemporary warfare.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that Gaza rescuers face dangerous conditions without sufficient equipment, vehicles or fuel. They are mostly left to dig out survivors from under tons of broken stone, concrete and twisted metal with their hands and rudimentary tools.

The carnage has taken a heavy physical, mental and emotional toll on rescuers, and Israeli strikes have killed at least 118 of them during the conflict, according to local rescue officials.

“First responders suffer from unspeakable levels of stress, anxiety and frustration,” said Hisham Mhanna, a Red Cross spokesman in Gaza. “We have heard them describe feelings of helplessness toward the victims who they could not save, and of the immense pain of losing colleagues on duty.”

From the war’s onset — which began after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel — rescue workers were struggling to keep up with the pace of airstrikes. In the first year of the war, the Israeli military said it struck more than 40,000 targets across an area the size of Detroit with approximately 60,000 bombs and other munitions.

This war has been like no other that Gazans have lived through, with no safe place to shelter and no target off limits, residents and aid officials say. The Israeli military has said it takes “feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.”

Despite the trauma, Mr. al-Shaghnobi, 23, said he was compelled to persist with his rescue work with the Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency services agency, knowing that he could save at least some lives.

He said he regularly shared videos and images on social media to draw attention to the suffering in Gaza.

In one video posted in October in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City, he calls out to a young boy whose muffled screams can be heard from under rubble.

“Don’t be scared,” Mr. al-Shagnobi yells, issuing a stream of rapid-fire instructions: “Rashid, don’t tire yourself out. Don’t talk. Don’t lose consciousness.”

Illuminated by a head lamp, the rescuer crawls in between collapsed floors to reach Rashid’s partly exposed head, the rest of him buried in crushed cement and stone. After three hours, Rashid is pulled alive from the rubble.

“Every day is harder than the day before,” Mr. al-Shaghnobi said. “My soul is tired from this war.”

The Red Cross, which has provided masks, boots, protective uniforms and body bags to rescuers, has also offered limited mental health counseling. But given the extreme trauma of the situation, the sessions have not been enough, said Mr. Mhanna, the Red Cross spokesman.

Amir Ahmed, a paramedic, said that a few months ago, his nightmares had become too much for him and he quit his work with the Palestine Red Crescent rescue service.

“You reach a point where you can no longer continue with this,” he said recently.

Mr. Ahmed said he had worked in antiquity preservation before the war, and also volunteered with the Red Crescent during Gaza’s many conflicts because he was trained as an emergency medical technician. He said he was called to duty on the second day of the war.

As the conflict dragged on, he said, he found himself falling deeper into depression. At home with his wife and three children, he grew increasingly tense and angry.

Some days, he tried to avoid talking to anyone and wanted to spend all of his time sleeping, even when they were displaced in tents or crowded into one-room apartments.

“I would dream of the people who were in pieces that I picked up with my own hands,” he said, lowering his voice.

The smell of blood lingered on his hands for days after one rescue and recovery, he said, adding that there had been almost no psychological support or mental health help.

Although he feels guilty about quitting his work as a rescuer, he said he did not regret his decision.

Some rescue workers accuse Israel of targeting them, an accusation that the Red Crescent and the Gaza Civil Defense have echoed.

The Israeli military said it had never targeted rescue workers, and would never do so deliberately. “The Israel Defense Forces also recognize the importance of the special protections given to medical teams under international humanitarian law and takes action to prevent harm to them,” a military statement said.

Mr. Ahmed said he had lost several colleagues during the war.

Among them were two Red Crescent paramedics, Yousef Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun. In February, the two were dispatched to rescue Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old girl who was trapped in a vehicle with several dead family members.

They lost contact with Red Crescent dispatchers soon after arriving at the scene and nearly two weeks later were found dead in their burned ambulance. Hind, too, was found dead inside her family’s vehicle.

The Red Crescent accused Israeli forces of bombing the ambulance as it arrived “despite prior coordination” between the organization and the Israeli military. The Israeli military did not comment on the attack despite repeated requests.

Early on in the war, Mr. al-Shaghnobi said, he and his fellow rescuers would bid one another farewell each night, unsure how much longer they would survive the Israeli onslaught.

In November 2023, he said, he was with his crewmates at the scene of a seven-story building that had been felled by an Israeli airstrike days earlier, trying to retrieve the bodies of a family.

As the rescuers combed through the rubble, another Israeli airstrike hit, killing two rescue workers and the two surviving family members, according to accounts from relatives at the time and Mr. al-Shaghnobi.

He captured the immediate aftermath of the strike on video.

“Why is this happening to those of us who just rescue people?” he said more recently. “We have nothing to do with the weapons or the resistance. All our work is humanitarian work. Why are the Israelis targeting us?”

Naseem Hassan, a paramedic and ambulance driver, said that his brother was killed nearly a year ago at Al Amal Hospital while working with the Red Crescent. He died in an airstrike after going up to the hospital’s roof to turn on a generator, the surviving brother said. The Israeli military said it was “not aware of the incident.”

Mr. Hassan, 47, said he had been worn down by the strain and exhaustion of rescuing the war’s wounded.

When the conflict began, he said, he weighed 190 pounds. Now, after living mostly off canned food and bug-infested bread and enduring physically draining days spent digging through rubble, he is down to about 150 pounds.

“Mentally, we are patient and resolute, because we have to be,” he said. “If we were to have a nervous breakdown, who else is going to rescue people? Who is going to recover the bodies? Who is going to bury them?”

Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.

Every day​ for the past week, Kim Kwon-seop, 72, has joined thousands of others gathered near the home of South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol​. They were determined to shield Mr. Yoon from prosecutors who wanted to detain him on insurrection charges stemming from his short-lived declaration of martial law last month.

To them, it was the opposition who had committed insurrection, abusing its majority power at the Assembly​ to repeatedly block Mr. Yoon​’s political initiatives. To them, the opposition’s parliamentary majority ​was invalid because the election last April was rigged. And to them, protecting Mr. Yoon was synonymous with protecting South Korea from “North Korea followers” who have taken root in every corner of their society, from the judiciary to schools to the news media.

​South Koreans commonly dismiss such conspiracy theories as little more than online demagoguery spread by right-wing YouTubers with the help of social media algorithms. But amid the country’s entrenched political polarization, they have fueled the turmoil over Mr. Yoon’s situation, driving zealous believers like Mr. Kim to take to the streets in large numbers, calling for the president’s return to office.

“When I leave home for this rally every day, I tell my wife that this may be the last time she sees me alive, because I am ready to die for my cause,” Mr. Kim said. “This is not just about protecting President Yoon. It’s about saving my country for my descendants.”

If President-elect Donald J. Trump has a “Make America Great Again” movement behind him, Mr. Yoon has the “taegeukgi budae” ​(literally, “national-flag brigade”). It consists of mostly older, churchgoing South Koreans who enliven their rallies with patriotic songs, a wave of South Korean and American flags in support of their country’s alliance with ​Washington, and vitriolic attacks on the nation’s ​left-wing politicians, who they fear would ​hand their country over to China and North Korea.​

“We won!” flag-waving supporters of Mr. Yoon shouted on Friday when investigators retreated from the presidential residence after failing to serve a court warrant to detain him for questioning.

“Yoon Suk Yeol is depending on the South Korean version of MAGA to hold onto power,” said Ahn Byong-jin, a professor of political science at Kyung Hee University in Seoul.

Mr. Yoon invoked the right-wing fear and indignation when he declared martial law on Dec. 3 to “eliminate the despicable pro-North Korean and anti-state forces at one stroke.” But his attempt to place his country under military rule for the first time in 45 years lasted only hours. The opposition-dominant National Assembly ​voted to rescind it​ and later impeached him.

Suspended from office​, Mr. Yoon ​now faces a trial at the Constitutional Court, which will decide whether to formally remove him. He is also subject to separate investigations​ from prosecutors, who have accused him of committing insurrection when he ordered troops to seize the Assembly and to detain his political enemies during his martial law.

With public surveys showing a majority of South Koreans wanting him ousted, Mr. Yoon’s strongest defenders are his flag-waving supporters and the right-wing YouTubers​, who glorify him as a champion of promoting the alliance with Washington. These YouTubers, some with around a million subscribers,​ demand Mr. Yoon​’s reinstatement and livestream pro-Yoon rallies, where speakers call the efforts to remove ​him a “coup d’état” at North Korea’s behest. They ​also reinforce political ​polarization by channeling conspiracy theories against Mr. Yoon’s progressive enemies​.

Right-wing YouTubers have long boasted of their friendship with Mr. Yoon, after dozens of them were invited to his inauguration in 2022. In the wake of his botched martial law, Mr. Yoon left little doubt that he was a big fan.

“I am watching your struggle in real time through YouTube livestreaming,” Mr. Yoon said in a message to his supporters gathered outside his home on New Year’s Day. “Our country is in danger because of anti-state​ forces running amok, as well as forces in and outside who violate our sovereignty.”

​During a rally on Wednesday, Seok Dong-hyeon, a lawyer who ​serves as Mr. Yoon’s spokesman, thanked right-wing YouTubers there and called the investigators trying to detain Mr. Yoon “a front” for the opposition.

“This is war,” he said​. “And you are warriors.”

Like other democracies, South Korea has grappled with the role of social media in shaping politics​. About 53​ percent of South Koreans say they ​consume news on YouTube, higher than an average of 30​ percent in ​46 countries​ surveyed, according to a 2023 report by Korea Press Foundation. ​

Analysts worry that algorithm-fueled information bubbles, with people continually served more of the type of content they have expressed interest in by watching, are helping divide the nation.​ The language and conspiracy theories Mr. Yoon and his supporters adopted mirror ​those purveyed by right-wing YouTubers, said Hong Sung-guk, a former lawmaker and columnist.

“Yoon’s ​is likely the world’s first ​insurrection instigated by algorithm addictions,” Mr. Hong said.

A dozen participants in a recent pro-Yoon rally interviewed for this article were all firm believers in the conspiracy theories​, saying that right-wing YouTubers were their primary or only source of news.

“They speak the truth,” said Kim Jae-seung, 72. “I no longer read newspapers or turn on TV. They are full of bias.”

Kim Yong-son, 70, pulled out his battered smartphone to show a video clip that depicted the progressive leaders as ​hellbent on undermining South Korea’s alliance with the United States and colluding with North Korea and China — viral content created by the popular right-wing pastor, the Rev. Jun Kwang-hoon.

In 1980, Chun Doo-hwan, the leader of the military junta that ruled the country at the time, ​justified imposing martial law by citing the threats from “North Korean puppets” and “dangerous elements” at home.

As his own political troubles deepened in the wake of scandals ​and disaster, Mr. Yoon aligned himself more openly with the radicalized political right. He accused unfriendly ​journalists of spreading “fake news” and called his political enemies subscrib​ers to “Communist totalitarianism.” ​He even appointed a right-wing YouTuber as head of the center for training government officials.

​Long before Mr. Yoon’s declaration of martial law, some of the right-wing YouTubers had urged him to take such an action to deal with his domestic enemies. They also spread sinophobia, hinting that China was a secret manipulator of domestic politics in South Korea, including its elections. Rallies of his supporters often ring with calls for “expelling Chinese.” Mr. Yoon raised fears of Chinese spies while defending his martial law.

Mr. Yoon and right-wing YouTubers ​also argue that election results in South Korea are no longer trustworthy. ​Pro-Yoon supporters often carry signs saying “Stop the Steal​,” ​borrowing a term made popular by people in the United States who falsely claimed that the ballot count for the 2020 presidential election was manipulated against Mr. Trump.​ One of them, Shin Eun-ju, 52,​ said​ she believed the vote fraud theory, citing “YouTube” as her source.

The police and prosecutors, as well as the election authorities, have long dismissed the allegation as groundless. ​But when Mr. Yoon declared martial law, he also sent troops to the National Election Commission​ to investigate allegations of vote fraud. Military officers involved in his martial law decree had instructions, prosecutors said, to confiscate the commission’s computer servers and detain senior election ​monitors, tying, blindfolding and taking them to an underground military bunker for questioning​ about election fraud. (Martial law ended before any computers were seized or people taken away.)

Mr. Yoon and his lawyers have not commented on specific allegations, and they have broadly denied allegations of insurrection, calling his acts the legitimate exercise of presidential power.

“It’s clear that the president lost his mind to outlandish vote-fraud conspiracy theories while watching low-quality YouTube channels,” said Cho Gab-je, a prominent conservative journalist.

Mr. Yoon’s lawyer, Yoon Kab-keun, said the allegations of rigged elections were strong and divisive enough to merit an investigation.

Google Korea said it manages YouTube contents according to its community guidelines.

Ironically, it was also YouTube ​that helped news of Mr. Yoon’s declaration of martial law go viral on the night of Dec. 3, prompting citizens to rush to the National Assembly to delay the advance of troops and buy time for opposition lawmakers to vote down the martial law.

“It was a clash between the different roles of algorithms,” Mr. Hong said. “Algorithms help information go viral, but also help make you a slave to it.”

The Islamic State has lost thousands of fighters to death or prison and suffered the demise of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria. But the global reach of the group, also known as ISIS, is still vast, in part because of its sophisticated media output and the people around the world who consume it.

On New Year’s Day, a man with an Islamic State flag killed at least 14 people when he drove into a crowd in New Orleans. Authorities say there was no evidence that the man, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, had active connections to the terrorist group. But the F.B.I. said “he was 100 percent inspired by ISIS.”

It is not yet clear which specific online content Mr. Jabbar may have seen or how else he may have been radicalized. Experts noted that the placement of the flag on the truck resembled one depicted by ISIS in a media campaign urging followers to “run them over without mercy.” And, authorities said, he posted several videos to his Facebook account before his attack in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS.

From online videos to social media platforms — and even a weekly Islamic State newsletter — the group that wants to force all Muslims to adhere strictly to the faith’s earliest teachings has a very modern media strategy.

“Terrorism is essentially communications,” said Hans-Jakob Schindler, a former United Nations diplomat who is the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, a think tank with offices in New York and Berlin. “It is not warfare, because obviously, ISIS cannot militarily defeat the West, right? They tried and it didn’t exactly end well.”

A terrorist newsletter

How did the Islamic State keep its influence alive? In part, by transforming its movement into a global franchise beyond the Middle East, with active chapters in Afghanistan, Somalia, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Caucuses and Turkey, among other places.

But the glue that holds the disparate branches together — and also helps to inspire “lone wolf” terrorists like Mr. Jabbar who carry out their own attacks — is the Islamic State’s sophisticated media operation. Experts say that while it is doubtful that the media operation has a physical headquarters, it is highly centralized and controlled by its media directorate. Much of its output appears to come from affiliates in Africa, which have recently been the most active in terms of attacks..

The group also puts out an online weekly newsletter called Al Naba, or The News, which contains details of the group’s latest exploits, implicitly encouraging followers to commit acts of violence.

“The Al Naba newsletter comes out like clockwork every Thursday, which is one of the more impressive things that the group is able to do,” said Cole Bunzel, a scholar of militant Islam in the Middle East at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

“They have an editorial; they cover the different provinces, as they’re called; they cover attacks from that week. They tally up the number of attacks and casualties that they claim. And that’s the main way that they stay connected with their global support base,” he said.

The most recent edition of the newsletter, published on Jan. 2, did not mention the New Orleans attack, and the Islamic State has not claimed responsibility for it.

Al Naba was initially published through the messaging app Telegram and other platforms, constantly adapting as different channels were shut down, said Aaron Zelin, a Washington Institute fellow who has tracked the activities and propaganda of Islamist groups for more than 15 years.

Supporters of the group have also disseminated messages on Twitter, Facebook pages and other social media platforms, according to researchers. When their user profiles are blocked, they often just create new ones. T he Islamic State has used decentralized internet tools that are harder to shut down and moved some of its messaging to the dark web, Mr. Zelin said.

Terrorism analysts say that it has been easy for extremists to connect with potential supporters on social media because of the lack of effort both by some of the companies that operate the platforms and by governments to force a crackdown.

Mr. Schindler said that in light of the New Orleans attack both political parties should ask: “Why is this massive industry with these profits not helping our security services to prevent such attacks? Why do we not get a tip, as we do from the banks and every financial institution in North America and worldwide, that there is a terrorist here, or a tip that there’s a radicalization process going on?”

Terrorism experts say the Islamic State’s mastery of media and message is a key to its success. Al Qaeda, which the Islamic State split from in 2013, laid the groundwork, publishing both online and print magazines and producing videos as well as social media.

‘Kill them wherever you find them’

In January, 2024, the extremist group revived a campaign directed at its global adherents: “kill them wherever you find them,” a reference to a verse in the Quran.

The idea, which first surfaced in 2015, was to encourage would-be followers to commit acts of jihad at home rather than traveling to Iraq and Syria. That notion became even more important once the caliphate was defeated.

During the period when the Islamic State held ground in Syria and then Iraq (2013-2017) and was eager to gain adherents in the West, it was notorious for posting grisly depictions of violence, such as the beheading of the photojournalist James Wright Foley.

Now, experts say an increasingly daunting challenge is that social media platforms are doing much of the work of spreading the Islamic State’s message, as algorithms that seek to boost engagement take some users deeper and deeper into the extremist worldview.

“Terror groups don’t have to make a ton of effort to radicalize people anymore; the algorithm does it for them,” Mr. Schindler said. “The point of the algorithm is to keep the user on the platform, to give them what they like, and if this happens to be Islamic extremism or if you are in the radicalization process, your worldview shifts.”

On the ground in Syria

In Syria, where the Islamic State took advantage of a long civil war to seize a large swath of territory, only to lose it eventually to U.S.-backed fighters, the group has begun to rebound, accelerating its attacks. That trend might continue, because the regime of President Bashar al-Assad was suddenly toppled in December by another extremist group, Hayat Tahrir al Sham, which was once associated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.

The situation is still fluid, but some analysts fear that the Islamic State could regain ground amid the chaos. The group’s newsletter has spoken dismissively of Hayat Tahrir al Sham as “jihadists turned politicians,” but has not called for attacks on them.

Meanwhile, Hayat Tahrir al Sham and other rebel groups say they should take over the role of guarding Islamic State prisoners in eastern Syria and manage the camps holding some 40,000 Islamic State fighters and family members — a job that has been done for nearly five years by the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Force, which is backed by the United States. Many terrorism experts question how Hayat Tahrir al Sham, which once had links to the Islamic State but then bitterly separated, might carry out the mission of suppressing it.

The Islamic State recently renewed its “Breaking the Walls” media campaign, which encourages the imprisoned fighters to break out of the jails in eastern Syria and free their families.

If that succeeds, Mr. Zelin said, it would be a “disaster.”