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.

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.

Persia is 7,000 years old and will fight to survive.

The truth was, there was never a connection between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden. There were no weapons of mass destruction, either.

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 Sahara is Africa's great divide.

Once you start bombing in Syria, when you start looking for targets, there will be a lot.

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.

I have seen heroics - soldiers saving other soldiers' lives - and horrors.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The Syrians are better suited to sort out their internal divisions than anyone else.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

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