Richard Engel

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 people of Gaza are trapped. Israel has sealed the border, and they have no way to leave the Gaza Strip to do business.

It seems nothing good comes out of Abu Ghraib.

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.

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.

Foreign aid projects have pumped billions of dollars into the Afghan economy.

The Taliban may pine for a pre-industrial society, but most Afghans do not.

Afghanistan was always a backwater in the Islamic world.

Damascus was the seat of the Ummayad Caliphate in the 7th and 8th centuries.

Iraq was home of the Abbasid Caliphate, a golden age when the Muslim world was at the forefront of math, science and medicine.

For many foreign fighters, the jihad in Iraq and Syria is a commuter war.

The Israeli military believes it has destroyed all of Hamas's tunnels, or at least all the ones it knew about.

To be slapped with a shoe is a dirty insult in the Muslim world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

President Bashar Assad's regime is in the unique position of being targeted both by Israel and supporters of al Qaeda.

Israel specifically does not want Syria to hand over weapons, chemical or conventional, to Hezbollah.

If Israel sees weapons moving toward its border, it acts.

'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.

Every war has revolutionary justice.

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.

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.

Egypt has a presidential system. The president runs the state. Who the president is matters profoundly.

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.

The Muslim Prophet Mohammed was a big believer in charity and firmly established helping those in need as a basis of the religion.

Egypt is the most populous Arab nation, the seat of Sunni Islamic doctrine, and has tremendous political, religious and social influence on the rest of the region. For better or worse, it will lead the rest of the Middle East by example. So goes Egypt, so goes the region.

War can be fun for certain people. It's a magnet for sadists, losers, and angry dreamers.

Every country where the the United States maintains troops has a status of forces agreement.

On one level, bombing ISIS is easy. The U.S. knows where the group operates. There's no need for a ten-year hunt like the one for Osama bin Laden. The terror group has two capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. Al-Qaeda never had such an obvious home address.

Many in the U.S. military believe ISIS needs to be immediately, and repeatedly, smashed by American drones and warplanes.

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?

The U.S. spent billions of dollars to build a secular, professional national Iraqi army but failed because, despite all the U.S.-supplied guns, tanks and planes, the Iraqi military fell apart when challenged by a band of terrorists.

The Donetsk People's Republic is the self-declared pro-Russian government that wants to break away from Ukraine.

Hezbollah and the government are only two of 18 political factions in Lebanon, most of them armed. There are militant Christian groups, Palestinian radicals, al-Qaida, Druze militias and even armed bands of Marxists still operating in Lebanon.

Hamas is a Palestinian political party with an aggressive militant wing.

Hamas has long been Israel's enemy, but in the wake of the Arab Spring, the group is empowered like never before.

Fences and walls can be effective and even soothing, at least for those who build them.

Every child is taught if you try to please everyone, you end up upsetting everyone.

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.

Any information about U.S. special operations forces is highly sensitive.

Some Iraqi troops aren't willing to fight for their government. But many Shiites appear willing to fight for their religious leaders.

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.

If Syria collapses completely, the United States and the world would have to consider who, and what, fills the vacuum.

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.