New York-I went down a minor Twitter rabbit hole yesterday (still not calling it X) and discovered that some of my fieldwork in Syria & Turkey in 2014 was cited in Conflict with ISIS: Operation INHERENT RESOLVE, June 2014–January 2020…
Beirut- The last part of the Cyprus segment of my Fabled City video series is now up. I take the viewer along the ethnic-Greek side of the UN buffer zone, the ‘Green Line’ that cuts the Cypriot capital of Nicosia…
Larnaca- I have a new piece out this week on The Redline Podcast site on the election of Nikos Christodoulides as the republic’s new president, it’s youngest and therefore first post-1974 generation leader. This island has long fascinated the hell…
Nicosia- After exhausting myself in the best possible way covering the presidential election here, I was back at the hotel up very late merely thinking about the story I was planning to write the next day ie today for Australia-based…
Larnaca- I spent three very tranquil days on the southern Cypriot coast where I didn’t do much other than walk around in the rain and sample savoury vegan cuisine as the hours rolled by. I’d longed for years to visit…
Manbij-I have a new piece out for Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor (subscription required) regarding the ongoing strategic deadlock over this modest city in northern Syria’s Aleppo governorate. Manbij has been in the news as of late as the Turkish government…
Manbij- Along the Manbij Military Council’s mostly quiet frontline with the Turkish military and its Islamist Syrian Arab proxy militias, headlines have emanated from this mostly misunderstood crisis locus. One of the most crucial points which I personally found maddeningly…
Istanbul- I realised upon arriving in Turkey’s commercial capital tonight this visit marks twenty years of my coming here. I first came to Turkey in the middle of a EU to MENA backpacking trip in 1998 between semesters. I’ve been back…
New York- With Turkey’s renewed war against the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK) in the Qandil range in Iraq’s Suleimaniyah Governorate, the war against IS was given another not so new dimension. Ankara’s battle with Kurdish rebels has gone on for decades, formally…
New York- Yesterday marked the centenary of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Armenians and their supporters in the international human rights arena describe the massacres as a calculated genocide undertaken by the Ottoman military in the midst of the Great War…
New York- Three years ago today I trekked into northern Syria’s rebellious Idlib Governorate from Hatay Province in Turkey. I had to put immense trust in my fixer who was living in a Turkish Red Crescent camp at the time with…
New York- I have a new (and final for the time being) report on the battle for Kobane for IHS Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst titled “Ideological divide – Kobanê’s ethnic war.” As of today, the siege of the formerly non-descript…
New York– I have an article out in the November edition of Middle East Insider edited by David Hartwell on my observations on the battle between the YPG and the IS in Kobane in October. It was one of the…
An Unnecessary Siege from Derek Flood on Vimeo. Barcelona- I have a new article this week for Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Monitor concerning my observations on the siege of Kobane from October 10-15. I also have a short piece on the…
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…
Murşitpinar- Don’t have time to crunch out much text today as I’m firing off a few reports from the past few days for a client but I wanted to post some more images of the siege of Kobane. While it has…
Murşitpinar- Things have been hectic here in recent days and I don’t have time to write much text for TWD but wanted to put up a few images that might otherwise go unseen. The battle for Kobane is nothing short of…
Gaziantep- It is being reported that four people have been killed in clashes between Turkish ethno-nationalists and Kurds here tonight according to CNN Turk. I was just outside the main government hospital while going to an all-night bakery and didn’t notice…
New York- The other day I picked up The History of Armenia by Simon Payaslian somewhat at random off the bookshelf mainly to get some regional context for Georgian history during the Menshevik period and subsequent Bolshevik takeover shortly thereafter. Reading about Transcaucasia as a buffer…
Barcelona- In terms of collecting images from around the world as a photographer in the last 15 years, beyond the vast adjustment from analog to digital there has been the management of multiple devices that collect images digitally. Aside from…
Diyarbakir- Though I try not to get overly personal with TWD’s posts as it’s more of a news/analysis site, I’ve just arrived in southeastern Turkey (northern Kurdistan to some) and this marks twenty years of my travels in the Middle…
New York- I have a new article out on how the ongoing war in Syria is helping stoke sectarian tensions in Iraq that are manifesting themselves in the form of daily suicide bombings, shootings, and dual massive AQ jailbreaks. My article…
New York- In the summer of 1999 I embarked on an ambitious backpacking trip attempting to travel from London to Lahore entirely overland/water. The second to last leg of this rambling adventure was securing a visa for the Islamic Republic…
New York-One of the myriad topics was what constitutes or defines intervention in Syria. A high-ranking NATO official explained to me at 2 2012 security conference that the Alliance was emphatically not going to get involved militarily in Syria even…
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…
New York- I have a piece out in today’s edition of Asia Times Online from my meeting in Istanbul with Khaled Khoja, one of the more vocal member’s of the Turkey-based Syrian National Council, on the past, present, and future…
Istanbul, Köln, & New York- It’s been a while since I’ve been able to do an update after about three weeks of nonstop travel and work. I’m just going to post a mishmash of backlogged things of no particular importance.…
Istanbul- Concluded a fascinating interview with one of the founding members of the Syrian National Council on my last night here. Absolutely fascinating. We delved a good bit into the history of the Ba’ath Party, a subject I never tire…
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…
Ain al-Baida- Made an incredibly arduous trek into Syria’s war-torn Idlib Governorate yesterday. Working on my first article on the hardscrabble conditions of the Free Syrian Army. I was missing driving in the relative comfort of a late model Toyota…