And Then All Hell Broke Loose Quotes

“These days, I no longer believe there ever are truly good guys or bad guys in war, at least in the Middle East. They’re generally shades of gray. But that doesn’t translate well on television. It was too complicated. Too remote.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“...if the United States never intended to help, it shouldn’t have built up the expectation. The false promise of help was cruel and inexcusable and it would only get worse over time. If a man is drowning and a boat drives past in the distance, the man accepts his death and goes down quietly. If a man is drowning and a boat pulls up beside him, dangles a life jacket, tells the world he wants to help, but then doesn’t throw the life jacket, the drowning man dies crying and his family might take a blood oath to take revenge on the boat’s crew. This type of anger was already starting to build in Syria and al-Qaeda would capitalize on it.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“It is a disturbing aspect of human nature that if there is a place where there are no consequences and where the most grotesque murders are tolerated in the name of a cult claiming to be a faith, a certain type of person will be attracted to it.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“Reporters go through four stages in a war zone. In the first stage, you’re Superman, invincible. In the second, you’re aware that things are dangerous and you need to be careful. In the third, you conclude that math and probability are working against you. In the fourth, you know you’re going to die because you’ve played the game too long. I was drifting into stage three.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“Everything changed with the First World War. The Middle East was reorganized, redefined, and the seeds were planted for a century of bloodshed.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“MOST OF THE NATIONS OF the Middle East can be divided into those with long histories and no oil, and those that have lots of oil and very little history. With a few notable exceptions, both groups share a common feature: they were cobbled together by outsiders. The borders of the modern Middle East were drawn by Europeans after the First World War with no regard for the interests or backgrounds of the people who inhabited it.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“Cairo was, and remains, an ugly, cement-colored, park-free city, dotted with a few bewildering, mind-expanding splendors that make the whole place manic and magical. There was always noise, dirt, and exhaust, the honking of horns and the screeching of brakes. My”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“On August 3, 2012, the fifteenth day of the government offensive, rebels in the city said they were desperately low on ammunition and expressed dismay that the international community had not reacted when a huge massacre could be coming. Again, Libya was the example. Gadhafi threatened to overrun Benghazi and when he tried to do it, NATO started bombing. Now in Syria, Assad was threatening to crush the opposition in Aleppo and had already started doing it, but Washington’s reaction was only hand-wringing. In my conversations with rebels it was clear they were becoming increasingly disheartened and desperate. (The rebels would usually communicate with each other on Skype, blending in with the billions of people using the Internet instead of going through cell-phone towers.) The United States was apparently still skittish about sending in arms because it feared they would end up in the hands of Islamic extremists, but that, like so many unintended consequences of US foreign policy in the Middle East, was a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this stage the rebels were numerous, strong, motivated, and moderate and I made that clear in my reports on the air.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“When I take risks now, I do so only when I have to and with every precaution. I used to prospect for news, dropping into places to see what was up. Well, I could go to parts of Libya today and find lots of good stories, but I probably wouldn’t be around to tell them.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“Obviously it was happenstance, but it did change my opinion of human nature. I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them. It’s an atavistic thing, buried deep in our DNA.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“Ottoman provinces were re-formed and cobbled together into states. The region was carved up with little regard to ethnic, religious, or territorial concerns. The flawed and cavalier treaties of World War I explain to a large degree why the Middle East remains unstable and angry today. Every Muslim schoolchild is taught this arc of history and resents it: Islam’s golden era of the Arab caliphate, the Crusades, the Mongol devastation, the rise of the Ottomans, World War I, the carving up of the Middle East by Europe, and the poverty, weakness, and wars in the Muslim world of the last century. This is the basic and sad narrative taught at every mosque, and it has the benefit of being broadly accurate.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“The Crusades, waged intermittently from 1095 to 1291, but which continued in waves for centuries after that, were military campaigns sanctioned principally by the Roman Catholic Church to reclaim the Holy Land. American students barely learn about the Crusades, but they are essential to understanding the wars of the last decade.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“...in the assassination of three of its first four caliphs, the “successors” to Mohammed and rulers of the faithful. Those early assassinations led to the split between Sunnis and Shiites, battle lines drawn fourteen centuries ago that US troops would encounter, and help reignite, in Iraq. There is no distinction between modern and ancient history in the Middle East. No region is more obsessed with its own past. Islam began as a force to be reckoned with, and Muslims have longed to return to their former glory.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“To be effective, demonstrators must pick the right square and make it the center of their activities.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“All countries take the kidnapping of their troops seriously. But it drives Israel absolutely crazy. It is an affront to every person. Almost everyone in Israel is or has been a soldier. There is total commitment to the principle “leave no man behind” because nearly everyone could be that man or woman. All men and women, except some Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews, serve in the military, and remain in the reserves. When a soldier is kidnapped, Israelis think of their own sons and daughters. That”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“ISIS wouldn’t have existed without the US invasion of Iraq. It was born out of the Sunnis’ feeling of alienation, their belief that they’d been pushed aside—which, of course, they had been. Sunnis suffered a thirteen-century-old injustice with power stripped from them by Washington and given to Iraqi Shiites and their coreligionists in Iran. This grievance is at the core of ISIS ideology. Simply put, no Iraq war, no ISIS. Two”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“In the Muslim world according to bin Laden, the Ottomans hardly count. Islamic fundamentalists look back almost exclusively to the Arab caliphate, particularly its early years. Those who see history as bin Laden did are generally called Salafi Muslims. Those who want to act like bin Laden to change the system through violence are called Salafi jihadis. Al-Qaeda is a Salafi jihadi movement. Salafism is Islam as Allah recited it, and jihadi means “through war,” so it is a militant movement seeking an “originalist” form of Islam and willing to use force to get there. Salafism is often associated with the Wahhabi movement, an equally austere branch of Sunni Islam that arose in the early part of the eighteenth century. Wahhabis dominate Saudi Arabia, the paymaster and invisible hand behind many political machinations in the Middle East. In”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“In 2015, when I went back to the States or to an international conference, I found that people didn’t much care anymore. They saw the Middle East awash in blood, beyond redemption, and didn’t want to read about it or see it on the evening news. They just wanted to keep away from it.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“When I came to the Middle East, journalists had a kind of immunity that allowed us to travel freely and meet with militants who hated Israel and the United States. In 2000, when I was working for Agence France-Presse, I didn’t feel fearful when I went to Gaza to meet with Hamas leaders or to the West Bank to speak to Palestinian gunmen. These men didn’t much like me. We didn’t have anything in common. But they felt that they had to treat me with common decency and a modicum of respect because I was a journalist and I was writing about them. They wanted to spin me so that I would give the world their version of events. They were never completely happy, of course, because my pieces didn’t make them look as perfect as they looked to themselves. But they needed to talk to me and other reporters because we were the only way they could get their story out.

Now jump ahead to 2006. Zarqawi was on his killing spree in Iraq, and suddenly the Internet had become ubiquitous, and uploading videos on YouTube and other platforms was literally child’s play. So Zarqawi and his henchmen said to themselves, “Why should we let reporters interview us and filter what we say? We can go straight to the Internet and say exactly what we want, for as long as we want to say it, and we can post videos that Western journalists would never show.”

Journalists became worthless, at least as megaphones. But we became valuable as commodities to be stolen, bought, and sold, traded for prisoners, or ransomed for millions.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“the United States decided it was not going to intervene in Syria—at least for the time being. The Syrian opposition felt betrayed and abandoned. Worse, Syrians were now completely without hope, which is the most dangerous human condition. A man or woman with no hope is capable of anything.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“I went to a psychiatrist (NBC insisted we all go) and told her I had been through traumatic experiences before and understood that the kidnapping would leave “fingerprints” on me for a while. The key was knowing what to expect. If you get blind drunk, you know you’re going to wake up with a hangover. By the same token, I expected post-traumatic stress symptoms—anger, irritability, a sense of isolation—and I experienced those feelings, off and on, for several months. It’s like having the monkey on your back again, and being self-aware helps shake him off.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“We were meat to be bought and sold. Speaking Arabic made me a curious and unusual product. I didn’t want to be special. I didn’t want them to be curious about me.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“I kept seeing turning points. First the uprising. Then the creation of the Free Syrian Army, the FSA. Now a big assassination bombing in the heart of Assad’s government. But the turn never came. It just got worse and worse.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“He asked us what we were doing, and our smuggler said, “Oh, nothing. We’re just hanging out”—as if lots of Americans in ninja suits loitered around Syria in the middle of the afternoon. We asked him if he had a cell phone. He didn’t, which meant we had twenty or thirty minutes to get back across the Turkish border.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“The administration often used the analogy of planting the “seeds of democracy” in the Middle East, as if they’d sprout into democratic regimes as nature took its course. Democracy doesn’t sprout like apple trees. Scattering the seeds isn’t enough, no matter how many soldiers do it. To continue with the gardening analogy the Bush administration seemed to love (there were also many “seeds of terror” and “seeds of hope”), democracy is more like a fragile flower that requires constant attention and the right soil. Dictatorships and fascist regimes are hardy weeds that sprout on their own.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“I could scarcely believe that my new home was engulfed by war before I even had time to find an apartment. It seemed that war followed me everywhere I went.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“Trouble seemed to follow me around. The late Tim Russert, my friend and the esteemed moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, once joked, “Richard, just don’t come to Washington.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“I may have been in stage four, but I wasn’t completely crazy. At least eighty-six journalists had been killed in Iraq, more than in any other conflict since World War II, and another thirty-eight had been taken hostage. More would die in the years to come. I knew I had to limit my movements and take special care when I did go out.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

“Just as police and fire sirens reminded New Yorkers they were home, the sound of car bombs reminded me I was in Baghdad, which had become home for me. I was like a battered wife who can’t leave the man abusing her. I had moved into stage four and assumed, as a matter of math, that I was going to die in Baghdad. But still I wanted to stay.”
― Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East