Featured Image: For a Perfect Holiday – Visit Egypt

Following the partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel in 1948, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of the Sinai eight years later during the 1956 Suez Crisis, only a most tenuous ceasefire had existed between Israel and its Arab neighbors….

Street scene Tehran 1977

After restoring the monarchy in 1953, the Shah, to his credit, continued the progressive reforms started by Mossadegh. As part of his White Revolution, the Shah broke up large estates and gave land to small farmers, started a school meal program for poor children, built new…

Iraq, from the Arabic “araqa,” meaning “deeply rooted, well-watered,” did not come into being until the end of World War I, courtesy of Sykes – Picot, which created the British Mandate of Mesopotamia. But truth be told, Iraq should not even be a country, and…

Featured Image: E. Ou / ICRC / Getty Images

September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, starting a horrific war marked on both sides by missile attacks and artillery barrages on cities, and by Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. When it ended eight years later, as many as a million combatants…

Featured Photo: Sovfoto

Polytechnic University – Kabul, 1977

Notwithstanding the idyllic Kabul described in the opening pages of The Kite Runner, an island of privilege and modernity with prosperous businessmen in western suits, educated women with their hair uncovered, meticulously kept parks, even an American school, pre-1978 Afghanistan was mostly a very backwards place,…