New York- I’ve finally edited and uploaded the last of my Europe content to my Fabled City channel. In this vlog I take the viewer from Karterados down a giant hill to Monolithos, a moon-like volcanic beach on the back…
New York- I have a new episode out today on my Fabled City channel on the au currant topic of how many tourists are too many on the legendary volcanic Cycladic island. As a lot of news outlets were covering…
New York-Although I’ve been back home for a solid few weeks now, I’de been way to busy to edit and upload my Greece travel vlogs but here is the first in a short series. The hilltop village of Pyrgos that…
New York- I have a new yet belated vlog up today from my recent trip to Ukraine. This was difficult to put together in the sense that going over the footage I had to relive making the decision to abandon…
Baghdad- I returned to the Iraqi capital by road via a nearly identical route I took twenty years ago, two weeks from now. It was the utterly avoidable, wholly unnecessary war we could have avoided. Somewhat similar to Afghanistan, Iraq…
Aqaba- I have a new article out this week for Janes Intelligence Review (behind a paywall) about last month’s election of Nikos Christodoulides in Cyprus. The election marks a generational shift in [Greek] Cypriot politics as he will be the…
Amman- After being here in Jordan a good few days now I’ve finally gotten my first Lebanon episode up on my Fabled City channel. Had a number of tech snafus in recent days with my iPhone flying out the car…
Beirut- I’ve got my very short Athens excursion up on my still new-ish Fabled City channel embedded above. I had a very short layover in the Hellenic capital the other week between Barcelona and Larnaca the other week and spontaneously…
New York- After the past three years of my life were largely wasted in terms of career, I’m finally taking the plunge back into the wider world. Since 9/11 until March 2020, I had made a name for myself, not…
New York-I appeared on a Twitter Spaces panel by The Redline Podcast‘s Francis Leach and Michael Hilliard about the current state of prime ministerial politics in flood-embattled Pakistan.I spoke alongside Michael Kugelman, Sahar Kkan, and Fereeha M Idrees. Khan was…
New York- I’m featured in this week’s episode of Noiser Podcasts‘ Real Dictators series about Gaddafi’s escalating feud with the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The north African strongman had famously, if…
New York- Yesterday was the nineteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States by al-Qaeda. The plot involved numerous Saudis and adhered to a zero sum Egyptian ideological backbone in which the ummah, or global Islamic community, is…
Kandy- For years I’ve wanted to visit this city in central Sri Lanka and its nearly mythical Sri Dalada Maligawa (Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic) where one of Siddhartha Gautama’s four canine teeth is stored for veneration by Buddhists…
Erbil- I arrived in the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) from Beirut as yet another plot point in my journey toward Syria. I made it a point today to visit the city’s magnificent citadel just before it…
New York- I have an article out for IHS Jane’s Terrorism & Insurgency Monitor entitled “A dangerous thaw – Nagorno-Karabakh heats up” after the recent clashes in the most hotly disputed territory in the South Caucasus. Nagorno-Karabagh, a Russian-Turkic-Iranian word mash meaning (Nagorno…
It’s the middle of winter here in NYC and I’m staying busy cleaning out my laptop and here I happened upon another unpublished story from my archives that I later used as the background for an article “Motivations and Methods…
New York- A hail of bullets can be hear in the video during an anti-terror police operation in the northern commune of Saint-Denis approximately 12 kilometers from central Paris. Here is a map of the precise location according to Youtube user trystero19.
Murşitpinar- Another quick blog entry with some images from Kobane and environs and recent days. The media narrative on the siege has shifted from predictions of the city’s imminent fall to IS being on the back foot in the battle…
Barcelona- I realized the other day that going to wars for years and years affects perhaps not only the psyche over the long term but also the synaptic algorithms that are part of an unending string of decision making processes…
Barcelona- I installed two triptychs here in Barcelona the other day from when I was conducting my senior thesis in Peshawar, Pakistan back in the autumn of 2000. The one above was on an abandoned storefront in El Clot while the…
New York- I attended a Georgian diplomatic party marking the restoration of Georgian independence this week hosted by Ambassador Kaha Imnadze. Georgia was briefly independent from 1918-1921 following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. The…
New York- I have an article out now for IHS Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst on the eruption of violence in Iraq’s sprawling western al-Anbar Governorate that borders the relatively calm governorates of Ma’an, Amman, Mafraq, and the somewhat sketchier Zarqa in…
Erbil- Here are a handful of snapshots from my iPod from my day running around the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan while trying to get situated.
Guest blogger: Raymond Pagnucco Follow Raymond on Twitter at @RaymondPagnucco See Raymond’s site here New York- I’ve known Ray Pagnucco for some twenty years now. Ray is constantly on the move in Asia and Africa, often interested in uncovering the world’s lesser…
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Antakya- I have a new article out in today’s edition of Asia Times Online on my journey into rebel-held northern Syria. In over a decade of jihads, war zones and civil unrest, I think this was the most difficult thing…
Barcelona- This hilarious article came out in the Daily Mail about show jumping rabbits here in Europe, something I never knew existed. So as not to get overly exercised about certain frustrating geopolitical constructs, one need only to picture Snoopy…
Barcelona- I’ve just come back to Barca for the first time since 2008 and the town is as vibrant as ever. Everyone is so thin and bronzed that coming from the bowels of outer borough New York City, one may…
New York- Got the new issue of MLM out yesterday. In this one we have a profile of Saudi jihadi ideologue Faris al-Zahrani by Murad Batal al-Shishani, sketchy Malaysian JI/AQ operative Marwan by Jacob Zenn, the real Sajid Mir of…
New York- I appeared on Saudi state television’s KSA 2 Friday to discuss the extension and, I suppose, expansion of the American war in Afghanistan (and to a lesser extent Pakistan) from the initially trumpeted July 2011 withdrawal to sometime…