Richard Engel Quotes

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.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

Turkey wants to see Bashar al-Assad go and wants to kind of expand its sphere of influence into Turkey so its Ottoman glory or Ottoman past are once again project into the Syrian provinces. That's kind of what Turkey's vision is.

- Richard Engel

When you look at Syria, and you look at all the militant groups on the ground, there are many groups in Syria that could pose a threat to the United States, not just Khorasan.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets.

- Richard Engel

The U.S. invaded the wrong country, destroying an odious government that was not responsible for 9/11. I don't know how you recover from invading the wrong country, no matter how you spin it.

- Richard Engel

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.'

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

Many senior government officials, CIA, FBI, counter terrorism officials - when they look back at the decade, they effectively conclude that the United States overreacted after 9/11.

- Richard Engel

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Killed not by a massive troop deployment but by a commando raid carried out by a few dozen highly trained men and helicopters.

- Richard Engel

I think the Chinese model is one that appeals more and more in the developing world. People see that an authoritarian state can hold onto power, can hold on to stability and can drive the economy forward.

- Richard Engel

Kidnapping is always a threat in this life of reporting on men hurting one another because of religion and politics.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

For years, Lebanese have known that Palestinian camps like Nahr al-Barid and Ain al-Helwe - hopeless slums crowded with generations of disenfranchised Palestinian refugees who can't go home because of Israel, and can't work because of Lebanese laws - are awash with gunmen, criminals and, since the war in Iraq, al-Qaida inspired jihadists.

- Richard Engel

Putin believes Russia is back, and he may be right.

- Richard Engel

Each time there is a conflict between Israel and Gaza, accusations fly over who started it, each side blaming the other.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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.

- 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.

- Richard Engel

Israel sees the world just beyond its borders collapsing.

- Richard Engel

War is not a petri dish to examine and analyze our emotions.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

The Arab Spring is over. The days of the protesters with laptops and BlackBerrys in Tahrir Square are long gone.

- Richard Engel

For decades, Saddam and his Sunni minority had imposed their will on Iraq, carrying on a 14-century tradition of Sunnis controlling Mesopotamia despite a Shiite majority.

- Richard Engel

Not surprisingly, in most Sunni regions there has little appetite for free U.S.-sponsored elections.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

An Egyptian newspaper once publicly identified me as the C.I.A. station chief in Cairo. It seemed so stupid at the time. I was only 24, a little young to be a station chief, and, of course, I was never with the C.I.A.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

There are many Israelis who are not keen on Barack Obama - they did not want to see him elected.

- Richard Engel

Lebanon does not have a powerful army.

- Richard Engel

Israel is becoming a fortress. Fences along the borders with Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

The U.S., often in secret, carries out counterterrorism missions all the time, with drones in places like Yemen and Somalia.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

Under a decades-old agreement, Palestinian refugee camps are supposed to administer and police themselves. Lebanese troops are technically not allowed to enter them.

- Richard Engel

'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.

- Richard Engel

Afghanistan and Iraq were lumped together in what was called a 'global war on terrorism.'

- Richard Engel

Rockets fired by the Taliban generally aren't guided.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

We know that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has some very dangerous, very important leaders who are tied directly to the top leadership of al Qaeda central, including a man who was formerly Osama bin Laden's secretary.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

Staying in a very public fight with the U.S. is exactly what Al Qaeda wants.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

It seems nothing good comes out of Abu Ghraib.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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?

- Richard Engel

Unfortunately, the American policy towards Pakistan is just to worry and express concern, and that is not a clear policy at all.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

Every war has its demons.

- Richard Engel

Israel is shutting out the Arab world and shutting itself in.

- Richard Engel

For eight years, you had the Bush administration with a very interventionist policy, driving into world affairs, driving primarily into the Islamic world, army first or fist first.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

You gotta love the names. They're so eager, earnest, and hopeful: Camp Prosperity, Camp Liberty, and Camp Victory are the names of just a few of the U.S. military bases in Baghdad.

- Richard Engel

When students and liberals initially occupied Tahrir Square, it looked like it might be a passing thing.

- Richard Engel

We should have a time to reflect on the accomplishments of the military, of their sacrifices, of their failures.

- Richard Engel

When you look at - when you talk to people in Africa and across the Middle East, they're not satisfied with the way things are going. Sure, this idea of democracy was injected into the region, but it has brought mostly chaos.

- Richard Engel

The U.S. spent years and years and billions of dollars to build the Iraqi army only to watch it collapse and hand over so many of its weapons.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

The Muslim Brotherhood is much more hardline than Turkish Islamists.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

Women, who enjoyed a high social status and levels of education under Saddam, saw terrible setbacks as Iraq fell into civil war. As a result of the sectarian violence from 2005-2007, women retreated to their homes and fell from public view.

- Richard Engel

The Muslim Brotherhood is a fundamentalist group.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

There are clearly many Egyptian free-thinkers and intellectuals - lots of wonderful Egyptian artists and architects and scientists.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

Foreigners who speak Arabic in the Middle East are often assumed to be working for the C.I.A. or Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.

- Richard Engel

The U.S. presence and American missteps made ethnic violence in Iraq far worse than it would have been otherwise after Saddam Saddam Hussein's fall.

- Richard Engel

Osama bin Laden organized an attack that was carried out against the United States, New York, Pentagon, and the other aircraft, with 19 attackers, 19 guys with box cutters. An attack that probably cost almost nothing.

- Richard Engel

Bhutto's regime is remembered for having one of the worst human rights records in Pakistan's history, and her government did not allow the media freedoms she criticizes Musharraf for crushing.

- Richard Engel

President George W. Bush, in his now-rare public appearances and interviews, still refuses to acknowledge he did anything to help Iran. But it doesn't really matter what he thinks.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

I think it's really important to start thinking about infrastructure as essential national security.

- Richard Engel

9/11 was a terrible, horrific, tragic day.

- Richard Engel

There is no Afghan Awakening Movement.

- Richard Engel

I don't think you're going to be seeing the U.S. employing large army divisions to deal with small terrorist groups again. I don't think they're going to be occupying foreign nations in order to dry up terrorist groups within them. I think that lesson has been learned.

- Richard Engel

Under Islamic law, adoption is difficult.

- Richard Engel

Assad's regime helped ISIS grow by attacking other opposition forces and rarely targeting ISIS.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime.

- Richard Engel

I think war should be illegal.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

Egypt has a devout population. People go out, they pray, they fast.

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

Mali exists mostly to itself. Few people go there. Few Malians leave. Most of Mali's 13 million people live, and seem to live quite happily, off the rice, corn and millet they grow and the long-horn cattle and goats they keep.

- Richard Engel

Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.

- Richard Engel

Every war has revolutionary justice.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

By 2007, Iraqi society had completely collapsed.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

The Sahara is Africa's great divide.

- Richard Engel

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

- Richard Engel

Many governments are quick to condemn Assad, but a dwindling number of them would celebrate a rebel victory in Damascus.

- Richard Engel

I'm basically a pacifist.

- Richard Engel

I don't think I'm invincible.

- Richard Engel

Afghanistan was always a backwater in the Islamic world.

- Richard Engel

It's probably time to end the global war on terrorism.

- Richard Engel