New York- I’m pleased to share that my fieldwork in Iraq from the war against IS circa 2016-17 is cited in a new book called Death, Dominance, and State-Building by MIT professor Roger D. Petersen published this month by Oxford…
Nicosia- I have a new piece out today for The Redline Podcast titled “Cyprus Votes: Growing Rifts and Eastward Drift” on this past Sunday’s presidential election here in Cyprus where the traditional establishment parties were thrown a curve by the…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Jaffna- In Libya, the 75-year-old General Khalifa Haftar who leads the Libyan National Army (LNA) is back in the news cycle this week in a big way. Reportedly backed by the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt in terms of war…
Unawatuna- Today the SDF finally declared the total clearing of Baghouz and with it the last patch of formal IS territorial control anywhere in Syria and Iraq. So today signifies the conclusion of the al-Jazeera Storm campaign which was launched…
New York-I have a new piece out in the September 2018 issue of the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point’s monthly Sentinel journal on IS’s insurgent rear bases and operations in Iraq’s northern federally controlled governorates of Kirkuk, Salah ad-Din, and…
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…