Category: Analysis

A Bombastic Recluse

New York- The 2nd half of the Noiser Podcasts production on the life, obscurantist rule, and death of President Saparmurat Niyazov is out this week. As I stated in my previous post since I didn’t shoot a single photo during…

Turning Up In Türkmenistan

New York-Some twenty years ago I wound up in one of our world’s most hermetically-sealed nation-states, Saparmurat Niyazov’s Türkmenistan. It was a place I never intended to visit nor was it part of a global bucket list to visit every…

City of the Hellenes

New York-A piece came out in the New York Times Business section titled “An Arrest in Canada Casts a Shadow on a New York Times Star, and The Times” after I spoke Ben Smith, the paper’s media columnist and former…

The Maghreb Bleeds the Sahel

Albuquerque- Last month I did an interview with the Associated Press about the long, complex history of Libya’s Khalifa Haftar (though the AP uses the transliteration Hifter) for article that was picked up by The New York Times, Washington Post,…

Iran’s Footprint in Africa

New York- With the extrajudicial assassination of Iran’s Major-General Qassem Soleimani outside Baghdad International Airport last month, I wanted to look at his strategic legacy a bit beyond the obvious headlines in Iraq and Syria. I decided to do a…

Legacy of the Toyota War

New York- Last month I was featured in an Al Jazeera Arabic documentary entitled For the rest of the story – Hifter .. General Coups about Libyan General/Colonel/strongman/warlord Khalifa Haftar’s (I prefer the more commonly accepted transliteration of his last…

The Tearing Pearl

Fremantle- I have a report out this week for Jane’s Intelligence Review from my recent travels in troubled Sri Lanka. I spent a few weeks on the island finishing up work from Syria and simultaneously conducting some field work before…

The Coming Battle for Idlib

New York- Some six and half years ago I trekked from Hatay province in southern Turkey to a small rebel-controlled town in Idlib governorate in northeastern Syria. The fighters I met at the time were local Sunni Arabs and indigenous Sunni/Sufi…