Iraq was home of the Abbasid Caliphate, a golden age when the Muslim world was at the forefront of math, science and medicine.
Richard Engel
Ethnically, Tuareg describe themselves as white. And they don't look Arab or black. Many Tuareg have light skin, light eyes and sharp angular noses and cheekbones. They are cousins of the Berbers of North Africa. Some legends say the Tuareg are the decedents of an ancient Roman legion that disappeared into the desert two millennia ago.
Fences and walls can be effective and even soothing, at least for those who build them.
The Sahara is Africa's great divide.
Insurgencies are easy to make and hard to stop. Only a few ingredients need to combine to create an insurgency; like oxygen and fire, they're very common and mix all too often. The recipe is, simply, a legitimate grievance against a state, a state that refuses to compromise, a quorum of angry people, and access to weapons.
Based on the people l've spoken to, I think the impression is: Is America safer from Al Qaeda? Yes. Is America weaker as a nation because we have overspent and over-focused on Al Qaeda? Yes. I think that would be the conclusion that people seem to have come to and that I tend to agree with.
War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.
Bin Laden is dead, and most of his friends are dead. But did it need to cost a trillion dollars and two land wars, including one that didn't have to do with Al Qaeda? Probably not.
In the 1990s, Islamists in Algeria won elections like the Brotherhood did in Egypt. The Algerian military refused to allow the Islamists to take power. A war erupted, killing between 100,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimates are to be believed.
In 2009, Hamas was relatively new to power. It had won elections just three years earlier and was flexing its newfound strength via a war with its old enemy, Israel, which it officially wants destroyed.
The truth was, there was never a connection between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden. There were no weapons of mass destruction, either.
The Syrians are better suited to sort out their internal divisions than anyone else.
The United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up after Saddam Hussein's army was driven out of Kuwait. Washington assumed Saddam was weak after losing the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqis rose up, but Saddam's troops killed thousands - Iraqis say tens of thousands - in a counter-offensive.
When I first arrived in Baghdad in January 2003, I thought I would soon rent a house and envisioned myself swimming in the Tigris to cool off after reporting in the city the caliphs called Madinit al-Salam, the City of Peace. A year later, I realized I wouldn't be taking any midnight dips - Madinat al-Salam no more.
Persia is 7,000 years old and will fight to survive.
For many foreign fighters, the jihad in Iraq and Syria is a commuter war.
Every child is taught if you try to please everyone, you end up upsetting everyone.
The Muslim Brotherhood, or 'the Brotherhood' for short, is an Islamic group founded in Egypt in 1928. It has been pursuing a secret campaign to take over the government since its creation.
Traditionally, all the kings of Saudi Arabia have been sons of the founder of Saudi Arabia, and they've gone from one son to the next.
In popular Egyptian and regional culture, women are seen as weak, easy victims to temptation in the same way Eve couldn't resist that shiny apple in the Garden of Eden.
Once you start bombing in Syria, when you start looking for targets, there will be a lot.
Anyone who follows the Middle East and Islamic world in general can't deny it is often a very violent place, that a band of instability now stretches from Algeria to Pakistan.
War can be fun for certain people. It's a magnet for sadists, losers, and angry dreamers.
Mali exists mostly to itself. Few people go there. Few Malians leave. Most of Mali's 13 million people live, and seem to live quite happily, off the rice, corn and millet they grow and the long-horn cattle and goats they keep.
If Syria collapses completely, the United States and the world would have to consider who, and what, fills the vacuum.
The Taliban may pine for a pre-industrial society, but most Afghans do not.
Shaped like Texas, but twice as big, Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world. It exports almost nothing - mostly just cotton, gold and livestock - and doesn't have enough money to import much of anything, either.
Under a decades-old agreement, Palestinian refugee camps are supposed to administer and police themselves. Lebanese troops are technically not allowed to enter them.
Afghanistan was always a backwater in the Islamic world.
Damascus was the seat of the Ummayad Caliphate in the 7th and 8th centuries.
The Muslim Prophet Mohammed was a big believer in charity and firmly established helping those in need as a basis of the religion.
We're all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists anymore.
Every country where the the United States maintains troops has a status of forces agreement.
Some Iraqi troops aren't willing to fight for their government. But many Shiites appear willing to fight for their religious leaders.
Osama bin Laden organized an attack that was carried out against the United States, New York, Pentagon, and the other aircraft, with 19 attackers, 19 guys with box cutters. An attack that probably cost almost nothing.
The people of Gaza are trapped. Israel has sealed the border, and they have no way to leave the Gaza Strip to do business.
Assad's regime helped ISIS grow by attacking other opposition forces and rarely targeting ISIS.
Many governments are quick to condemn Assad, but a dwindling number of them would celebrate a rebel victory in Damascus.
Kidnapping is always a threat in this life of reporting on men hurting one another because of religion and politics.
I don't think I'm invincible.
The U.S. invaded the wrong country, destroying an odious government that was not responsible for 9/11. I don't know how you recover from invading the wrong country, no matter how you spin it.
There was an insurgency under President Hosni Mubarak in the 1990s. Egyptian police and soldiers fought weekly battles with Islamists in the sugarcane fields and thick reeds along the Nile in rural southern villages like Minya, Sohag, Enna and Assiout.
ISIS controls a territory roughly the size of Maryland where 8 million people live. If it's attacked and toppled, who will fill the void?
I don't think you're going to be seeing the U.S. employing large army divisions to deal with small terrorist groups again. I don't think they're going to be occupying foreign nations in order to dry up terrorist groups within them. I think that lesson has been learned.
A lot of Iran's empowerment is a result of the war in Iraq.
I think war should be illegal.
I'm basically a pacifist.
I don't look for good-news stories or bad-news stories.
Unfortunately, the American policy towards Pakistan is just to worry and express concern, and that is not a clear policy at all.
The Arab Spring is over. The days of the protesters with laptops and BlackBerrys in Tahrir Square are long gone.
