About the Authors

Tim McGirk
Tim McGirk, TIME's Jerusalem Bureau Chief, is no stranger to conflict. He recently arrived in the Middle East after covering Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and thought he would be moving to a calmer region. He was wrong. War broke out between Israel and Hizbollah in mid-July, just as McGirk took up his Jerusalem posting.

Scott MacLeod
Scott MacLeod has been TIME's Middle East correspondent since 1995 and is based in Cairo. He was TIME's bureau chief in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1989-95. His 30-year career in journalism also included 10 years with United Press International, reporting between 1975-84 from the U.S., London and Beirut.

Andrew Lee Butters
Andrew Lee Butters moved to Beirut in 2003, and began working for TIME in Iraq during the Fallujah uprising of 2004. Previously, he worked in New York as a reporter at Bloomberg News and The Economist. He holds degrees in history from Brown and Cambridge universities and in journalism from Columbia.

Phil Zabriskie
Now a special projects correspondent for TIME, Phil Zabriskie joined the staff of TIME Asia in the spring of 2001, based in Hong Kong. Since then, the native New Yorker has lived in Vietnam and now Delhi, and has worked and reported in almost 20 countries throughout Asia and the Middle East, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and for several months of 2006, in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. He longs to return to Mongolia.