The author and Kamaran Najm co-founded a photo agency in Iraq and teamed up to document a new era in Kurdistan, a region with a long history of suffering. Then Kamaran was captured by ISIS.

A profile of Erik Prince, then the CEO of America’s largest and most controversial mercenary force, Blackwater, who happened to be a C.I.A. agent.

Behind the scenes, a small team of FBI agents spent years trying to solve a stubborn mystery — whether officials from Saudi Arabia, one of Washington’s closest allies, were involved in the worst terror attack in U.S. history. This is their story.

Iranian operative Qassem Suleimani has been reshaping the Middle East. Now he’s directing Bashar al-Assad’s war in Syria.

In Aug. 2008, the U.S. military called in an airstrike on its own security guards in Afghanistan. Dozens of children were killed.

Marine commanders did not act on dozens of pleas for additional manpower, machinery and time. When a training exercise ended in death, leadership blamed the very men they had neglected.

The Navy installed touch-screen steering systems to save money. Ten sailors paid with their lives.

On the death of a young reporter named Christopher Allen and the state of conflict journalism.

An unlikely Army wife tries to come to terms with her husband’s calling.

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress during the war in Afghanistan. They were not, and they knew it.

How a ferry disaster exposed the corruption devastating Iraq.

Veteran Andy Chavez’s miraculous journey from coma to Wheelchair Games.

Following fallen soldier Joe Montgomery from field to grave.

After the horror of ISIS captivity, tens of thousands of Iraqis—many of them children—are caught up in a mental-health crisis unlike any in the world.

As ISIS retreats, new horrors emerge for a Sunni family.

An oral history of the war in Afghanistan.

How killing by remote control has changed the way we fight.

Was Samantha Sally a prisoner or a conspirator?

How Saudi Arabia makes dissidents disappear.

“The Farsi Island mission was a gross failure, involving issues that have plagued the Navy in recent years: inadequate training, poor leadership, and a disinclination to heed the warnings of its men and women about the true extent of its vulnerabilities.”

How the CIA used a fake science fiction film to sneak six Americans out of revolutionary Iran. The declassified story that became Ben Affleck’s Argo.

A two-part series on America’s role in the Syrian civil war.

In a supermax facility on US soil, inmates are force fed—and barred from sharing their stories.

Burmese amber offers paleontologists an unprecedented glimpse into the Cretaceous. But it comes from a conflict zone.

The case against “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.