Kevin McKiernan

CAPTURING SYRIA’S KURDS: It’s been a career of conflicts for the award-winning Santa Barbara–based journalist Kevin McKiernan, who’s covered wars in all corners of the world since the 1970s. But he found a special niche when reporting on the First Iraq War in 1991, when he met the Kurdish people, the world’s largest ethnic group without a country to call home. In this week’s cover story, McKiernan reports on how Syria’s civil war is like “a 1991 moment” for that country’s Kurds, as the world is learning that they live there, too. “They believe that they are going to be the only winners in this bloody conflict,” said McKiernan, who published some of his first reports on the Iraqi Kurds in the 1990s in The Santa Barbara Independent. “I really had to cover it.”