Richard Engel Quotations | Page 2

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.

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.

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

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.

I had some training on how to cope with hostage-taking.

If you're in part of rebel-controlled Syria, and suddenly your house blows up or a building next to you blows up, it would be convenient for rebels to say, 'It was the Americans.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If democracy brings an undemocratic group to power, is that a victory for democracy?

The Iraqi government will try and retake some of the cities have that been captured by ISIS. That means the Shiite government dropping bombs on civilian areas, on Sunni cities. There will likely be a response with car bombings here in Baghdad, and this could be a long fight.

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

A lot of Iran's empowerment is a result of the war in Iraq.

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 think war should be illegal.

Were all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists anymore.

I dont look for good-news stories or bad-news stories.

Everest has a special place in all of our imaginations. For centuries, Everest was a little bit like the moon. It was the place where everyone wanted to go. Empires wanted to be able to say that they were the first to put a climber on top of Everest. So when a tragedy happens up on that mountain, I think it has a global resonance. Everybody's heard of Everest. Everybody knows what Everest is and what it means, and the significance.

How can you claim infallibility and claim that in these 114 [drone] strikes there was just one mistake -- one person killed that was a civilian -- and at the same time say, 'Well, we don't really know how many people were killed or who they were, but we know they weren't civilians'? I don't know how you can do that.

Putting a bomb in a dumpster or putting it with a timer by a race, it is not the kind of - similar to the attacks that we've seen where people open fire with assault rifles and things like that.

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.

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.