Paul Bremer was briefly the Bush administration’s point person in Iraq. His decisions would have lasting consequences.

An army vet vanishes in upstate New York.

How a young Afghan trucking-company owner became spectacularly rich.

Wayne Simmons was ideal conservative commentator. A former C.I.A. operative, he ate lunch with Donald Rumsfeld, took trips to Guantánamo aboard Air Force Two, and pumped the party line on Fox News. There was only one problem: Simmons had never been in the C.I.A.

The story of freelance journalist Anna Therese Day.

An ex-SEAL turns to “ocean therapy” to cope with chronic pain and PTSD.

The surprising bond between damaged birds and traumatized veterans.

A father’s search for meaning and justice five years after his son was killed during the Tahrir Square uprising.

A war criminal’s life on the run.

More than 4 million Syrians have fled the war. 2,647 have made it to the United States.

The final days of the last Navy SEAL to die in Afghanistan.

Why “the legal equivalent of outer space” continues to exist, fifteen years after 9/11.

The making of the drone.

Since the Syrian rebel leader Hassan Aboud joined ISIS, taking with him fighters and weapons, he has been behind a sprawling mix of battlefield action and crime.

An ethnography.

Edward Luttwak is a military strategist, a classical scholar, a cattle rancher, and an adviser to presidents, prime ministers, and the Dalai Lama.

The DEA warns that drugs are funding terror. But is the agency stopping threats or staging them?

On a thin sliver of land called Rojava where “rules of the neighboring ISIS caliphate ha[ve] been inverted,” a Kurdish Syrian college trains its future autonomous leaders.

They were cousins who grow up in Raqqa amidst parties, beaches, even bikinis. They married ISIS fighters to protect their families, then became morality policers.

Bomb makers—including ISIS—have been on a quest to obtain red mercury, a weapon reputed to be powerful enough to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” They haven’t found it yet. That might be because it doesn’t exist.

How a tattooed video store clerk with a history of drinking and drug use ended up at an Islamic self-help class leading to the birth of ISIS.

The daily life and dwindling hopes of a 12-year-old Syrian refugee.

On Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who pushed America to war. Chalabi died on Tuesday at the age of 71.

A Syrian refugee’s epic escape route through Europe.

The disappearance of the Ghost Boat and its 243 passengers off the Libyan coast.