New York- My frontline work in Iraq in the heady days of the war against IS-known as Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve in American security speak-was cited in a research report published by the Rand Corporation. The report titled…
New York- My work in Syria and Iraq was cited by the Library of Congress and the London-based openDemocracy respectively. My fieldwork in northern Syria’s Idlib governorate for Janes Islamic Affairs Analyst was given a hat tip in “Unrest in…
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…
Erbil- Today marks fifteen years since the disastrous Anglo-American invasion of the Republic of Iraq. Eighteen months after the American intervention in the Afghan civil war became internationalised in response to 9/11, the next phase of what I refer to as…
Barcelona- Proud to announce that I have to lead story in this month’s issue of Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst (Subscribers only). I travelled along a section of the so-called “Green Line” that divides Iraqi Kurdistan from Arab-majority Iraq. Iraq’s Green…
Erbil- Here are a handful of snapshots from my iPod from my day running around the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan while trying to get situated.
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- It’s been twenty long years since Eyad Ismail, Ramzi Yousef and co drove that Ford Econoline Ryder rental van through the Holland Tunnel from Jersey City and parked a massive urea urea nitrate bomb in the parking garage…
New York- I had a couple of long term projects published at the end of this past week. The first was an examination of the little known history conjoining Mali in West Africa with North Korea in Northeast Asia over at…
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…
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- The Avtomat Kalashnikova assault rifle, known popularly as the AK-47 or Kalashnikov, became one of the defining symbols of Third World national liberation movements and a physical manifestation of anti-imperialist thought in the second half of the twentieth…
New York- In sorting through some old belongings today I found a couple of now ancient-seeming portfolios which I went to a lot of trouble to make at the tail end of the portfolio era. In what turned out to…
Antakya- Doing some googling to see where some of my recent Syria work might have ended up, I stumbled upon some references to my work from close to a year ago that I missed in the chaos of the time.…
Antakya- I have an article out in today’s edition of Asia Times Online on my view from a rain soaked Hatay Province of events just over the border in a besieged Syria. It’s been raining here nonstop since my arrival,…
Antakya- I’m sitting here typing in a dark, musty hotel room at 5am in the Levant. Hatay to be exact. Hatay may very well be a part of the Turkish Republic but it is also a little talked about corner…
Los Angeles- The AfPak Channel has an incredible photo essay that Messr. Mohammed Qayoumi, president of Cal State East Bay, gave them after he scanned a 1950’s era image book published by the Afghan Ministry of Planning in the now…
Los Angeles- The May issue of MLM is out. Worked hard on this one. Enjoy! If you’re not already enjoying, subscribe!
New York- The new issue of Militant Leadership Monitor is online over at the Jamestown site. In our 2nd issue, I have another article on a recently killed Abu Sayyaf leader named Albader Parad who was recently taken down in…
I have a new piece in this week’s edition of Terrorism Monitor on the Jamestown Foundation site that can be read here. It is the first long form interview with PJAK leadership that I’m aware of.
Mardin, Turkey- After a long two weeks in Iraq, I’ve returned to northern Kurdistan a.k.a. southeast Turkey. I wasn’t able to update the site much while in Iraq as the poorly named Hawler Palace Hotel did not have an internet…
I dug up and scanned this picture from exactly a decade ago. As a youthful stunt, I scrawled “God Bless America” on a t-shirt and ran in front of the “Den of Spies” aka the former American embassy in Tehran.…
Keep that momentous pixelated video coming! I posted a piece addressed to Ayatollah Khamenei last night on the HP here. According to the Guardian, during the called-for day of mourning, protests are not letting up from Kurdistan to Baluchistan and…
A bird’s eye view video, I’m guessing from a mobile phone, shows the breadth of the crisis the Iranian leadership must now genuinely face. The Iranian government’s strategy of blocking websites and giving foreign journo’s the shoe is inherently flawed.…
Is this Iran’s Tianamen? Tehran’s restive urban class does not appear to be slowing down its outrage over what opposition supporters are terming a “Stolen Election.” Though without maintaining empirical evidence thus far, those opposed to the Ahmadinejad government here…
A lot of Iranian voters were absolutely crushed by the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “Landslide” victory at yesterday’s polls. Unbeknownst to me, according to a piece in today’s LA Times, Iranian Americans and more recent Iranian immigrants were allowed to vote…
We’re all on pins and needles awaiting the outcome of today’s elections in Iran. If Ahmadinejad wins a second term, either genuinely or by manipulation, it may be for Iranian voters what the second Bush term was for a…
Obama appeared in Misr yesterday. Misr, for those who are not acquainted, is the endonym of Egypt as Deutschland is the endonym of Germany. Americans and other concerned parties might do well to address people how they prefer as…
I attended an event with Alastair Crooke, author of Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution and veteran EU Middle East diplomat at the New America Foundation here in Washington. The event was webcast on the The Washington Note and Crooke’s presentation was…
As Israeli tanks and soldiers pound their way through the Mediterranean’s most destitute outpost, let’s think about how we arrived at this point. During the 2006 war between the Israeli state and Hezbollah, the Middle East raged with hell fire…