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…
Kyiv- Spent a whirlwind less-than-24-hours in the much talked about of late Ukrainian capital the other night. Kyiv. or Kiev is you prefer the Russophone transliteration more common to Westerners, struck me as a magnificent city. Walking around town is…
Thera- Having come to Greece, or the Hellenic Republic as it’s actually called in English or Hellas more colloquially, for over two decades, I have a deep attachment to the place. But my personal history and relationship is a very…
Thera- In northern, and more recently eastern, Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) emerged as the critical indigenous force in the conventional battle to defeat the so-called Islamic State (IS). The SDF is an aggregate, underfunded outfit comprised of an…
Naxos- I’ve just spent the last ten days on an island in the heart of the Cyclades that for decades I’d either passed by or stopped briefly to change ferries. I hadn’t intended on visiting this splendid place at all…
New York- A couple of months ago I was riding in a van along a rough hewn piste in Deir ez-Zor governorate’s al-Jazeera region east of the Euphrates river when i was shown a map app that IS had used…