New York- Yes, I’m doing another quick tanbur post. In all my years traveling across Iraq and Syria as a reporter and analyst, there was a lot of downtime while waiting in limbo for access to this or that story…
The Transcendence of the Tanbur
Category: Uncategorized
TWD’s Fieldwork in the Qandil Mountains Cited
New Yiork- My fieldwork on Kurdish militancy in the Qandil mountains of Iraq’s Erbil governorate was cited by the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies published by Metropolitan University Prague. In The PKK’s Friends and Foes in the…
TWD Cited by Oxford University Press
New York- My foundational work in the very early days of the Sahelian crisis is cited in a new book by Dr. Morten Boås of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. His forthcoming work is titled Sahel: The…
TWD Cited by Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
New York- I’m happy to share that my work in Mali for the CTC Sentinel was cited by the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. The paper entitled Mali: A Political Economy Analysis examines the historical roots of this…
Exploring Monolithos: Santorini’s Otherworldly Beach
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…
Chasing the Sunset: Overtourism on Santorini
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 Santorini Travel Vlog from Pyrgos
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…
100 Hours in Western Ukraine
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…
Back in Baghdad: Iraq 20 Years On
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…
Generation-X Takes the Reins in Cyprus
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…
Fabled City Beirut Episode Now Up
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…
New Cyprus Work for Jane’s Intelligence Review
Nicosia- I have a new article out reporting from the Cypriot capital on the February presidential election pasted below. Have a look!
Fabled City Episode 3 Is Now Live
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…
I’ve Launched a Youtube Channel for 2023
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…
Pakistan’s One-Man Noah’s Ark in Troubled Waters
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…
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…
The Pariah Becomes Paramount
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…
Nineteen
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…
The Very Uncertain Future of the SDF: Global Repercussions and Local Geopolitical Consequences
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…
Salafist Technologists: How I Discovered an Internal IS Map App
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…
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…
Bodhisattva Vow
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…
A City with Stories to Tell
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…
Unfrozen
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…
The Walls Have Ears
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…
#ParisAttacks Heavy gunfire in Saint-Denis
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.
The Intervention
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…
Peace In Light of War
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…
Pakistan Triptychs in Barcelona
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…
Diplomats and Hors d’Oeuvres on the River
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…