About

Hi, there and thanks for stop­ping in. I’m Christo­pher Allbrit­ton, for­mer AP, New York Daily News and Time Mag­a­zine reporter. In 2002, I went stum­bling around Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, the north­ern part of Iraq out­side Saddam’s direct con­trol, look­ing for sto­ries. (Some might call it “look­ing for trouble.”)

In 2003 I became the Web’s first fully reader-funded journalist-blogger with Back-to-Iraq.com. Now, Insur­gen­cy­Watch will adopt the same model with the aim to become the fore­most reported blog on the emerg­ing threats pop­ping up in Pak­istan and Afghanistan.

About me: I’m a jour­nal­ist with almost 20 years expe­ri­ence in the busi­ness, with exper­tise rang­ing from tech­nol­ogy to war to busi­ness. Much of the last few years have been spent in the Mid­dle East, with brief trips to Africa and else­where. Recently, I was a Fel­low at Stan­ford in the Knight Fel­low­ship pro­gram, which is con­cerned pri­mar­ily with the future of jour­nal­ism and how to keep it going. I’m a firm believer in main­stream news­pa­pers as a source of great infor­ma­tion, but I’m also real­is­tic. With fewer and fewer news­pa­pers send­ing staffers over­seas (or even using stringers and free­lancers), the abil­ity for Amer­i­cans to get good for­eign news and analy­sis is suf­fer­ing. I hope that InsurgencyWatch.com can help fill in that gap a lit­tle bit.

InsurgencyWatch.com will report on the emerg­ing threats pop­ping up in Pak­istan and Afghanistan, pri­mar­ily, but never let it be said geog­ra­phy will limit a good story. I have reported on pirates off the coast of Soma­lia, Hezbol­lah in Lebanon, Sunni jihadists in Iraq and rubbed shoul­ders with money laun­der­ers in Dubai. The inhab­i­tants of this men­tal geog­ra­phy are not just al Qaeda ter­ror­ists. They are also Russ­ian mob­sters, Ukran­ian gun run­ners, Alban­ian human traf­fick­ers, Hezbol­lah dia­mond smug­glers, Chi­nese cyber­gangs and Somali pirates. This law­less area stretches from the no-man’s land of Waziris­tan to south­ern Lebanon all the way to the tri-border area of South Amer­ica. It’s not a place, it’s a state of mind.

I’ve been in Pak­istan since mid-June. You can email me story ideas at

In addi­tion to adver­tis­ing, I also rely on dona­tions from you, the read­ers, to sup­port the report­ing of Insur­gen­cy­Watch. If you feel this blog is worth sup­port­ing, please click the Pay­Pal link below.