Professor Paul Moorcraft has written over fifty books on security issues. He was previously a senior instructor at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and later at the Defence Academy. He also worked for the Ministry of Defence both in Whitehall and in the field in the Middle East. Besides teaching full-time at ten major international universities, he has also worked as a war correspondent in thirty war zones. He is a frequent broadcaster on defence issues for the BBC and was formerly a regular pundit for Sky News Arabia.
Dr Moorcraft has lived on both the Gazan and the Lebanese borders and in the Arab quarter of Old Jerusalem when he was a student. Unusually, he worked alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan and accompanied them in close combat during the Russian occupation. He has covered many of the major events in the Middle East, from the siege of Jenin in 2002 – when he was smuggled into the refugee camp by the Palestine Liberation Organization – to joining George Galloway on his secret visit to Baghdad on the eve of the war against Saddam Hussein in 2002, before returning to Iraq to record the British occupation in Basra.