There is a slight knocking noise on the phone line, not nearly the worst interference I've heard on a phone call to Mexico, but Kevin Huckabee apologizes anyway. "Sorry about the noise in here," he says in the same low Texan half-mumble I remember from our first meeting in Jurez two months ago. "Some guy is banging on his cell wall, I don't know why." Huckabee, 47, is talking to me from a phone inside Cereso prison on ...

Ayman al-Zawahiri, a cerebral Egyptian surgeon who joined his first jihadist cell at age 15, is as much the force behind al-Qaeda as his more famous friend Osama bin Laden. When the two first met in Pakistan in 1986, al-Zawahiri made a powerful impression on the younger, inexperienced Saudi millionaire. Within a couple of years, bin Laden was funding al-Zawahiri's militant group Al Jihad, while Egyptian militants close to al-Zawahiri were helping bin Laden found al-Qaeda. That was the beginning ...

The Syrian colonel sits cross-legged on a patch of moist soil. He's wearing a borrowed plaid shirt and pale green trousers and is surrounded by dozens of men who fled the besieged northern city of Jisr al-Shoughour to an orchard a few hundred meters from the Turkish border. He says his name is Hussein Harmoush and shows me a laminated military-ID card indicating his name and title. Everyone around calls him muqaddim — Arabic for his rank. A colonel with ...

Everybody, it seemed, had heard the stories, and could relay the same horrific details about Syrian soldiers allegedly raping women and girls with cruel impunity. There were ugly accounts, told by many refugees from the northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughour, some of whom had crossed into nearby Turkey, and by others who remained in a strip of Syrian territory hugging the Turkish border. Soldiers had abducted several beautiful young women from the town, they said, enslaved them ...

The white-haired, 61-year old exile has come to the hospital to see the refugees from Syria. He used to be a diehard Ba'athist Party member back in that country. But when some Baathists split in the 1980s, he joined the faction associated with the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Eventually, he abandoned it in disgust and chose to live in southern Turkey. For the past 20 years, he has lived away from politics. But now, the trim, mustachioed ...

It was the moment everyone on the "Caravan of Solace" had been waiting for. Lined up along the sides of a bridge on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, hundreds of locals had gathered on Friday to welcome the convoy as it made its way into "the world's most dangerous city." As the long trail of buses and cars edged past hordes of people, supporters in this town on the U.S.-Mexican border screamed out "Justice" and held banners ...

The young Syrian in the white undershirt cradled a toddler in his arms as he sat beneath a line of laundry strung up between two stout gum trees. He stared out from behind the rusty metal gate of the disused tobacco warehouse that is now home to hundreds of Syrian refugees, most of whom are from the flashpoint town of Jisr al-Shughour, some 40 kilometers south of the Turkish border. A gaggle of frustrated journalists waited across ...

It is easy to miss the spirit gate that guards the entrance to Phiyer, a remote village in northern Laos. Half submerged in weeds beside a field of towering sugarcane, the simple wooden structure resembles a set of miniature rustic goalposts. Look closely, however, and you will notice it is strung with roughly carved swords and assault rifles made of bamboo. The villagers believe the gate wards off disease and evil spirits. A modern epidemic now threatens Phiyer and no amount ...

From the road, the two tractor-trailers looked like thousands of others that drive daily through southern Mexico lugging cement, bananas and other Central American goods. But when Mexican police officers shined an X-ray on the trucks, they saw an alarming cargo. Hundreds of men and women were crammed like sardines in a tin, squatting on the floor or grasping ropes to avoid getting crushed. There were seven people for every square yard , a stunning 513 migrants ...

Burma has been rendered in journalism, activism and art as a country of plain dichotomies: good vs. evil, liberty vs. suppression, the saintly Aung San Suu Kyi vs. the brutal monolith of the military junta. By its very premise, Burma Soldier, which airs this evening on HBO, muddies this picture. The documentary's subject, Myo Myint, is a former soldier who gave his adolescent years to the regime but came in adulthood to join the democratic opposition against it. ...