Richard Engel Quotes

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Richard Engel

Profession : Journalist

Birth : September 16, 1973

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Engel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Engel