非拉丁字符串与不同编码的比较

Question

I have a directory "Dir1" that contains n directories which were named with non latin characters I got the names of these directories by scandir

$allDirs =  scandir( ARCHIVE_DIR) ;
foreach( $allDirs as $dir){.....}

and I want to comapre each dir name with strings I have but the comapre return false I tried

 if(  $dir  ==  "أخبار"   )

AND

if( utf8_encode ( $dir  ) === utf8_encode( "أخبار" )  )

AND

strcmp ( $dir , "أخبار" )

AND

mb_strpos( $dir , "أخبار" )

When I tried mb_detect_encoding($dir)

mb_detect_encoding("أخبار") 

both of them returned utf-8 I'm not sure what is the issue here when I tried to print them to log via

file_put_contents( "n.log" ,$dir."--"."أخبار" ."
", FILE_APPEND  ) ;

it print identical strings !!!! but the compare always fail how to fix that ?