Nick Turse
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. He is the author/editor of several other books, including: Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa; Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam; The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyber Warfare; Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt); The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives; and The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. His website is Nick Turse.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, or Facebook.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, March 19, 2020 America’s Commandos Deployed to 141 Countries Last October, a group of eight Apache attack and CH-47 Chinook helicopters carrying U.S. commandos roared out of an airfield in Iraq. They raced through Turkish airspace and across the Syrian border, coming in low as they approached a village just north of Idlib Province where Islamic State leader... Read more |
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Views Monday, January 06, 2020 Trump Threatens Afghan Armageddon On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone circled over Afghanistan’s Paktia province, near the city of Khost. Below was al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden—or at least someone in the CIA thought so—and he was marked for death. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it later, both awkwardly and... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, November 06, 2019 Winter Is Coming They called it Castle Black , an obvious homage to the famed frozen citadel from the HBO series Game of Thrones . In the fantasy world of GoT , it's the stronghold of the Night's Watch, the French Foreign Legion-esque guardians of the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms. This Castle Black,... Read more |
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Views Friday, October 11, 2019 As the World Looks Away, Death Stalks the Democratic Republic of Congo GOMA, North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of Congo—The boy was sitting next to his father, as he so often did. He mimicked his dad in every way. He wanted to be just like him, but Muhindo Maronga Godfroid, then a 31-year-old primary school teacher and farmer, had bigger plans for his two-and-a... Read more |
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Views Monday, September 09, 2019 How to Read a Broken Body: Literature in an Era of Endless War Do you remember July 8, 2011? Where you were? What you did? Whom you talked to? Anything at all? I couldn’t pin down one single thing for that day. I couldn’t even locate an email I had sent or a photo I might have taken. It’s all evidently lost in the ether, known only to tech and telecom firms... Read more |
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Views Thursday, June 27, 2019 "What Does War Have to Do With Me?" Sometimes war sounds like the harsh crack of gunfire and sometimes like the whisper of the wind. This early morning -- in al-Yarmouk on the southern edge of Libya’s capital, Tripoli -- it was a mix of both. All around, shops were shuttered and homes emptied, except for those in the hands of the... Read more |
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Views Monday, April 22, 2019 No Need to Whisper, AFRICOM Isn't Listening In If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Or to bring this thought experiment into the modern age—if it happens in the forest, does it stay in the forest? I ask this question because it has a bearing on the article to come. Specifically, what if an article... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 08, 2019 Bases, Bases, Everywhere... Except in the Pentagon’s Report The U.S. military is finally withdrawing (or not ) from its base at al-Tanf. You know, the place that the Syrian government long claimed was a training ground for Islamic State (ISIS) fighters; the land corridor just inside Syria, near both the Iraqi and Jordanian borders , that Russia has called a... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, September 04, 2018 The US Military is Winning. No, Really, It Is! 4,000,000,029,057. Remember that number. It’s going to come up again later. But let’s begin with another number entirely: 145,000 -- as in, 145,000 uniformed soldiers striding down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue . That’s the number of troops who marched down that very street in May 1865 after the... Read more |
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Views Monday, August 06, 2018 The Legacy of Infinite War Raids by U.S. commandos in Afghanistan. (I could be talking about 2001 or 2018 .) A U.S. drone strike in Yemen. (I could be talking about 2002 or 2018 .) Missions by Green Berets in Iraq. (I could be talking about 2003 or 2018 .) While so much about the War on Terror turned Global War on Terrorism... Read more |