Washington hoped for a clean getaway from the two countries it invaded in the early 2000s. The Taliban, like the Islamic State, has other ideas.
Behind the flux of conflict on the ground in Syria-Iraq, all sides are digging in for a long war.
A vast blood-red memorial in London evokes war's victims. Behind it stand the weapon-makers that could create millions more.
The strength of the new jihadi movement is to link ideology and combat experience. The failures of its western enemy add fuel to its cause.
A second letter from an Islamic State adherent operating in the part of Syria controlled by the movement.
Armed drones, special forces, privatisation and secrecy are the preferred tools of military campaigns from Iraq-Syria to the Sahel. Now, researchers are mapping this landscape in the public interest.
A letter from Raqqa, in the heart of territory controlled by the Islamic State.
What should United Kingdom's defence policy be? A government department has commissioned advice from the noted SWISH management consultancy. This is an exclusive copy of its just completed report.
A major new war has begun in the Middle East. But the Islamic State movement is prepared, and the precedents are bleak.
Washington's strategy to defeat the Islamic State has the same deep flaws that marked earlier phases of the "war on terror".
Barack Obama's new strategy against the Islamic State commits the United States to further long-term conflict. It involves a great forgetting of the recent war in Iraq.
A new book by Gabrielle Rifkind and Gianni Picco highlights the urgent relevance of conflict resolution in addressing problems around the world, from Ukraine and Iran to the Islamic State.
