Category: Afghanistan

Our Last Hope is You

New York- This is a powerful new short film from New Zealand-based colleague and filmmaker Phil Stebbing about the plight of Farid, a former member of Afghanistan’s democratic government currently on the run from the country’s Taliban rulers. He lives…

The Fall of Afghanistan

New York- It has been painful to watch the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan after an utterly disastrous troop pullout at a feckless President Joe Biden’s behest. After nearly 20 years at war in the country, the United States and its…

Intervention

  New York- Fifteen year ago today the United States military intervened in the then ongoing civil war in Afghanistan which until 9/11 had been all but entirely ignored in the West save for a few women’s rights groups and other…

The Refugees

New York- In compiling a short manuscript of poetry that was written from approximately 1997-2002, its interesting for me to look back and see which poem topics are in a time capsule of that era and which are even more relevant…

Terminal 2 Blues

This is a rambling story I began nearly seven years ago on one of the most singularly interesting days of travel I’ve ever experienced. I just now stumbled upon it and felt like putting it up. Kabul/Dubai/Sharjah-At exactly 9am I…

Afghanistan-Where It All Began

New York- I spent a fascinating week down in central South Carolina at Shaw AFB lecturing on the socio-political and religio-cultural dynamics of the Levant. Within the sessions discussing the current state of affairs in the Arab and Kurdish world, it…

Dust and Urethane from Kabul to NYC

New York- Skateboarders Kenny Reed and Louisa Menke have published a handsome edition of their photographs of skateboarding in Afghanistan in 2009 with Vanderbooks of Rotterdam. They will be hosting a book release party this Saturday May 2nd at the Marlborough Gallery’s…

A Home in Defence

New York- An image I shot back in 2008 in Karachi was employed to tell the tragic story of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s disappearance and murder in the early days of the War on Terror. The programme, titled Witness: Remembering…

When an Anniversary Becomes History

Barcelona- Today is just another 9/11 anniversary it seems. On twitter, everyone is consumed by Obama’s speech last night vowing to “destroy” the so-called caliphate of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The brutality of al-Qaeda has been rhetorically…

Out the Window

Barcelona- After an egregiously long sabbatical in the chunky, ‘polar vortex’ torn streets of NYC, I finally made it back across the Atlantic. I put plans for returning to Iraq’s Green Line and Ukraine’s chaotic Donbas region on hold for the…

Getting Up on the 4th of July

New York- This past Friday evening while crowds were frantically swarming toward the rapidly developing Queens waterfront for the annual fireworks display celebrating American independence, I quietly maneuvered around the outer borough’s Long Island City neighborhood doing another photo installation. I…

The Gateway

New York-The other wekend I finally got around to a rather simple task that I’d wanted to do over a decade back. Before 9/11 I had a vision of doing guerrilla art installations around New York and other major Western…

Anbar-Insurgency Redux

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…

In Darkness

New York- While concluding a nearly month-long research trip to the Republic of Georgia in October, on my final night in Tbilisi I met with an analyst from Georgia’s MFA to discuss current trends in Islamic militancy in the North Caucasus…

So Long 2013

New York- As the worst year of my life comes to a quiet close, I can look back and be thoroughly grateful for the two reporting trips I was able to make to Iraq and Georgia and for the friends I…

The War That Was Barely Mentioned

New York- While Americans in many quarters erupted with both joy and relief that Barack Hussein Obama was reelected POTUS while right-wing ideologues and extremists (which may simply be cover for racism in some quarters) constantly harping on the just-around-the-corner…

9/11 Cover to Cover

New York-Going through a storage locker the other day, I dug up a lot of stuff from my personal archives in the early post-9/11 period. I collected lots of odds and ends back then thinking they’d be of historical import…

A Decade of War and Peace

Barcelona- Partly out of boredom and partly out of the itch to simply create something new out of old, I threw together this photo montage over the weekend. In this era of digital photography where one shoots thousands of frames…