Lessons from a war zone
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To have been a war reporter over the past ten years is to have worked under the shadow of the modern American way of war. From Libya a decade ago to my last reporting trip in Syria in 2019, the outcome of the wars that followed the Arab Spring have been decided by the presence or absence of American air power.
I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.
Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in th...
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