Columnist

Oubai Shahbandar
Oubai Shahbandar is a former defense intelligence officer and Middle East analyst with the Pentagon. He has been deployed to Iraq,Afghanistan, and has spent extensive time on the ground in northern Syria. He is now a conflict-zone documentary filmmaker based in the Middle East.
Twitter: @OS26
Latest published
What went wrong in Afghanistan
A decade before the fall of Kabul, I was deployed as a governance adviser to Brig. Gen. Scott Miller, who would soon become Gen. Miller, the last US four-star commander to serve on the ground in Afghanistan before the Taliban swept the country.
Biden’s team should beware of Houthis’ misuse of humanitarian concerns
In the final hours of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated Yemen’s Houthi militia as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” and its top leadership as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.”