“What is my name?” shouted a ten-year old boy in my face. “My name is PKK!”
I thought back to a moment when I was working on a story on a women’s prison in Afghanistan where the inmates often have and raise their children in jail. I asked one child his name. “My name is my […]

Turkish forces continued to pound Northern Iraq today in a grand show of force against Kurdish forces after yesterday’s scandalous revelations by the Turkish daily Taraf that the army had apparently ignored intelligence reports that the October 3 PKK attacks were imminent. The breaking news supports a commonly held theory that the PKK and Turkish […]

Amanda Lindhout
While I was in Afghanistan last summer I met a young, budding photojournalist named Amanda Lindhout.  She was kidnapped this past August in Somalia along with her Australian colleague Nigel Brennan and their Somali translator, Abdifatah Mohammed. This story has hardly been publicized in the international press, and it’s so telling of the […]

I take back what I said in my previous post, as the Turkish army has announced it bombed 31 targets inside northern Iraq since October 4. I guess I was too busy packing to check the news properly. The seventh air raid took place yesterday, although, as a caveat, I must note that many believe […]

Switching continents now….I will be spending the next few weeks in Turkey documenting the Turko-Kurdish tensions that have continued to plague the Eurasion nation, and that have largely prevented it from joining the European Union. I am, in effect, embarking on a long-term project on the whole of greater Kurdistan which will eventually take me […]

Poets in Translation
On my recent trip to London, I had the great fortune of spending some time with a few admired and celebrated poets from Africa who were on tour in the UK with the Poets in Translation group which has recently funded the translation of their work into English. Here are two of my […]