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.
— Richard Engel
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.
Every war has its demons.
President Bashar Assad's regime is in the unique position of being targeted both by Israel and supporters of al Qaeda.
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.
Faced with the crippling sanctions, Iran could simply decide it is paying too high a cost to pursue its nuclear program and could opt for negotiations and reconciliation with the United States and other members of the international community. This is clearly the preferred option of American leaders.
To be slapped with a shoe is a dirty insult in the Muslim world.
Iraq was home of the Abbasid Caliphate, a golden age when the Muslim world was at the forefront of math, science and medicine.
The Taliban may pine for a pre-industrial society, but most Afghans do not.
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.
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.
If democracy brings an undemocratic group to power, is that a victory for democracy?
Many governments are quick to condemn Assad, but a dwindling number of them would celebrate a rebel victory in Damascus.
The Syrian border town of Qa'im was the main gateway Islamic radicals used to go to Iraq. Syria became the passageway for extremists from Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations to fight a jihad against American forces in Iraq.
Under Islamic law, adoption is difficult.
For years, Lebanese have known that Palestinian camps like Nahr al-Barid and Ain al-Helwe - hopeless slums crowded with generations of disenfranchised Palestinian refugees who can't go home because of Israel, and can't work because of Lebanese laws - are awash with gunmen, criminals and, since the war in Iraq, al-Qaida inspired jihadists.
By 2007, Iraqi society had completely collapsed.
Egypt has a presidential system. The president runs the state. Who the president is matters profoundly.
Every war has revolutionary justice.
If Israel sees weapons moving toward its border, it acts.
There weren't many weapons in Egypt in the 1990s. Police controls on guns were very strict back then. That is no longer the case in Egypt today.
Afghanistan does have an air force: It has two C-130s. I saw one of them. It was nice, a gift from the United States. But two planes don't even make a Caribbean charter airline, let alone an air force for a country at war.
Persia is 7,000 years old and will fight to survive.
The Israeli military believes it has destroyed all of Hamas's tunnels, or at least all the ones it knew about.
Damascus was the seat of the Ummayad Caliphate in the 7th and 8th centuries.
Foreign aid projects have pumped billions of dollars into the Afghan economy.
It seems nothing good comes out of Abu Ghraib.
Each time there is a conflict between Israel and Gaza, accusations fly over who started it, each side blaming the other.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a fundamentalist group.
Rockets fired by the Taliban generally aren't guided.
ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime.
Lebanon does not have a powerful army.
The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets.
Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.
Initially, before the modern state of Iraq was created, there were three separate provinces here: a Shiite in the south, a largely Sunni one in the middle, and a Kurdish one in the north.
'Shabiha' is a difficult word to translate into English. It comes from the word Syrians used to describe the luxury Mercedes favored by the Assad family's operatives that the enforcers of the regime used to move money, smuggle weapons and intimidate opponents.
Israel specifically does not want Syria to hand over weapons, chemical or conventional, to Hezbollah.
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.
A nuclear program has arguably worked as a deterrent for North Korea and other states - would Moammar Gadhafi have been deposed and summarily killed if Libya had had nuclear weapons? Iranians might not think so.
The dangers of an Afghan collapse are many: Afghan deaths, a loss of American prestige, a loss of NATO prestige, a moral blow to U.S. troops and veterans, a Taliban resurgence, huge setbacks for women, and greater power for Pakistan and Pakistani extremists.
For many foreign fighters, the jihad in Iraq and Syria is a commuter war.
Afghanistan was always a backwater in the Islamic world.
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.
The people of Gaza are trapped. Israel has sealed the border, and they have no way to leave the Gaza Strip to do business.
The Muslim Brotherhood is much more hardline than Turkish Islamists.
Putin believes Russia is back, and he may be right.
In October 2008, American commandos launched a cross-border raid into Syria to capture an Islamic militant known as Abu Ghadiya. He was accused of being one of al Qaeda in Iraq's main smugglers of fighters and money between Iraq and Syria.
There are clearly many Egyptian free-thinkers and intellectuals - lots of wonderful Egyptian artists and architects and scientists.
Under a decades-old agreement, Palestinian refugee camps are supposed to administer and police themselves. Lebanese troops are technically not allowed to enter them.
There is no Afghan Awakening Movement.
