the great challenge now facing Saudi Arabia’s rulers: how to fight an increasingly bloody and chaotic proxy war in Syria using zealot militia fighters over whom they have almost no control.

The Saudis fear the rise of Al Qaeda’s affiliates in Syria, and they have not forgotten what happened when Saudi militants who had fought in Afghanistan returned home to wage a domestic insurgency a decade ago

Abu Khattab also mentioned proudly that he is no stranger to jihad.

There is a shortage of religious conditions for jihad in Syria,” he said. Many of the fighters kill Syrian civilians, a violation of Islam, he added.

He proudly trumpets his return to jihad on his Twitter feed, which features a picture of him clutching a rifle with his mangled hands.

You cannot prevent all young men from leaving the kingdom. Many of them travel to London or other places, and only then to Turkey, and Syria.”

“They especially like Saudis, because the Saudis are more willing to do suicide operations,” he said.

In the end, it was the slaughter of innocents that made him decide to quit, he said, and a broader feeling that the rebels alongside him were not doing it for the right reasons. “If the fight is not purely to God, it’s not a real jihad,” he said. “These people are fighting for their flags.”But there was another reason he gave up the fight.

The real war is not against Bashar himself, it is against Iran. Everything else is just a false image.”

World War I yielded a number of striking and affecting pictures. Some, included in the gallery of 380 presented in The Great War: A Photographic Narrative, are famous: the line of gassed men, blinded and clutching each other’s shoulders as they approach a first-aid station in 1918; the haunting, charred landscapes of the Ypres Salient in 1917. And yet in both cases, the more-renowned versions were their painted successors of 1919: John Singer Sargent’s oil painting Gassed, and Paul Nash’s semi-abstract rendering of the blasted Belgian flatland, The Menin Road. The essence of the Great War lies in the absence of any emblematic photograph.

The quest to communicate an unprecedented experience of combat began almost as soon as the war did, and it has continued ever since

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929): the war was unimaginable, dehumanizing, the unredeemable sacrifice of a generation. It marked the origin of our ironic sensibility

The central conundrum in representing the First World War is a stark one: the staggering statistics of matériel, manpower, and casualties threaten constantly to extinguish the individual. That was what the war poets understood, and why the images they summoned in words have been transmitted down a century. As Wilfred Owen did in “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917), the poets addressed their readers directly, unsettling them with a vision of the damage suffered by a particular man’s body or mind.

Photography, of course, can’t capture sounds or bitter intonations—that devastatingly exact gargling, not gurgling

We felt they were mad.”

Needless to say, such a move was not repeated.

A great deal of the official photography of 1914 and 1915 borders on the risible: stiffly posed pictures that gesture to the heroic war that had been foretold rather than the war that was unfolding. In one picture, a marksman in a neat uniform crouches safely behind a fortification, intent on his quarry. In another, a dugout looks like a stage set, in which the actors have been urged to strike contemplative poses.

e Battle of Guillemont, a British and French offensive that was successful but at great cost, this image from September 1916, by the British official photographer John Warwick Brooke, is disorienting at first glance. Are the inert lumps on the ground dead bodies, or parts of dead bodies? They are neither. But the initial relief upon recognizing that they’re inanimate objects evaporates

The British prime minister’s own eldest son, Raymond Asquith, was killed a few days later and a few miles away, at the Battle of Flers–Courcelette.

. All the way through—as he meticulously documents the laborious mobilization, the pointless charges, the dead and injured marooned in the field—Sacco’s perspective is from the British lines, which means the soldiers are seen mostly from the back. He gets the details of the carts, the guns, and the uniforms exactly right. The faces he draws are deliberately generic.

They visited the battlefields to find the small white headstone with their soldier’s name; when there was no grave, they touched the place where a name was engraved on a memorial. They held séances to summon the dead. But inevitably, as the decades roll on, what endures are the fearsome numbers.

In Tacloban, the hardest-hit major city, the city administrator, Tecson Lim, said last week that the police had been unable to confirm rumors of rapes and sexual assaults in the days and weeks following the typhoon

The U.S. stated after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that it would not allow such havens to exist again. Syria today is perhaps the largest safe haven the U.S. has seen without an ability to conduct counter operations, said Rogers. "That should concern all of us." The U.S., Russia, and other players in the civil war, now well into its third year, will likely meet this November for a second round of talks in Geneva, following a similar summit in July 2012.

Obama also defended the drone program , when it came into question this past May, by saying that the unmanned airplanes would only be used if there was an "imminent threat," and when they was "near certainty" that civilians would not be hurt and "no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat," CNN reported.

"We see them as a direct violation of our sovereignty. We also see them as a violation of international law," Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. Sherry Rehman told reporters in February.

"There is no question of quiet complicity. There is no question of 'wink and nod.' This is a parliamentary 'red line' that all our government institutions have internalized as policy," she said. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif met with President Barack Obama at the White House on Wednesday. Sharif brought up the issue of drones with Obama, and later emphasized "the need for an end to such strikes."

A break in U.S. drone strikes in May 2013 also aligned with the Pakistani election. Experts in counterterrorism strikes and relations with Pakistan believed at the time this was not a coincidence.

But our levels of maternal mortality are very high, and 35% of girls aged 6-14 years old are not in school."

"Women make up one half of the human capital available to any economy and any company; if that talent isn't integrated, that is going to be a loss for both women and men," she said.

It remains unclear to what Durbin was referring

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) alleged this weekend that a top House Republican leader told President Barack Obama, "I cannot even stand to look at you" during negotiations over the government shutdown.