blew me back from my window.

I haven't seen anything on this scale in Beirut since the dark days of the civil war,

a scene of complete destruction.

This is a tremendously large crowd, the size of which is unprecedented in Lebanon's modern history, ... It is truly massive and cannot be ignored.

At least the top two stories are ablaze, and the bottom three or four stories ablaze. And in the middle, between the two sets of flames, lights are still burning.

There was not one checkpoint from the southern part of Mosul all the way down to Tikrit for about three hours of driving,