Richard Engel
Iraq was home of the Abbasid Caliphate, a golden age when the Muslim world was at the forefront of math, science and medicine.Collection: Home
We know that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has some very dangerous, very important leaders who are tied directly to the top leadership of al Qaeda central, including a man who was formerly Osama bin Laden's secretary.Collection: Leadership
War can be fun for certain people. It's a magnet for sadists, losers, and angry dreamers.Collection: War
Foreigners who speak Arabic in the Middle East are often assumed to be working for the C.I.A. or Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.Collection: Intelligence
War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.
Syrians need to prepare for the aftermath if the Assad regime falls. Atrocities that could be considered war crimes have been committed in this country, and Syrians should rightly demand that the perpetrators be held accountable.
The Sahara is Africa's great divide.
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.
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.
Each time there is a conflict between Israel and Gaza, accusations fly over who started it, each side blaming the other.
Osama Bin Laden is dead. Killed not by a massive troop deployment but by a commando raid carried out by a few dozen highly trained men and helicopters.
The people of Gaza are trapped. Israel has sealed the border, and they have no way to leave the Gaza Strip to do business.
War is not a petri dish to examine and analyze our emotions.
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?
Persia is 7,000 years old and will fight to survive.
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.
The U.S., often in secret, carries out counterterrorism missions all the time, with drones in places like Yemen and Somalia.
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.
What is the Obama Doctrine? It seems to be one of disengagement, to try to ignore the hot, religious, dry, poor countries from Algeria to Pakistan.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think I'm invincible.
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.
For decades, Saddam and his Sunni minority had imposed their will on Iraq, carrying on a 14-century tradition of Sunnis controlling Mesopotamia despite a Shiite majority.
Not surprisingly, in most Sunni regions there has little appetite for free U.S.-sponsored elections.
President George W. Bush, in his now-rare public appearances and interviews, still refuses to acknowledge he did anything to help Iran. But it doesn't really matter what he thinks.
The U.S. spent years and years and billions of dollars to build the Iraqi army only to watch it collapse and hand over so many of its weapons.
For eight years, you had the Bush administration with a very interventionist policy, driving into world affairs, driving primarily into the Islamic world, army first or fist first.
We're all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists anymore.
We should have a time to reflect on the accomplishments of the military, of their sacrifices, of their failures.
When you look at Syria, and you look at all the militant groups on the ground, there are many groups in Syria that could pose a threat to the United States, not just Khorasan.
Once you start bombing in Syria, when you start looking for targets, there will be a lot.
There are many Israelis who are not keen on Barack Obama - they did not want to see him elected.
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.
When students and liberals initially occupied Tahrir Square, it looked like it might be a passing thing.
The U.S. presence and American missteps made ethnic violence in Iraq far worse than it would have been otherwise after Saddam Saddam Hussein's fall.
The Syrians are better suited to sort out their internal divisions than anyone else.
Kidnapping is always a threat in this life of reporting on men hurting one another because of religion and politics.
An Egyptian newspaper once publicly identified me as the C.I.A. station chief in Cairo. It seemed so stupid at the time. I was only 24, a little young to be a station chief, and, of course, I was never with the C.I.A.
I had some training on how to cope with hostage-taking.
After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.
Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.
By 2007, Iraqi society had completely collapsed.
There is no Afghan Awakening Movement.