Cengiz Çandar is a journalist. He is currently the senior columnist of daily Radikal in Turkey and a columnist of Al Monitor. After completing his studies in political science, he had a brief career as an academic and went on to live in several Middle Eastern countries. He subsequently worked for leading Turkish newspapers. From 1991 to 1993, he was Special Advisor to the President of Turkey, Turgut Özal and contributed to the establishment of the first Turkish-Kurdish relationship between Özal and Jalal Talabani (the first President of Iraq in the period after the fall of Saddam Hussein). From 1997 to 2011, he lectured on "Modern Middle East History and Politics" in a number of universities in Istanbul. Between 1999-2000, he was a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington D.C. He authored several books including the recent bestseller Mesopotamia Express: A Journey in History, published also in Arabic and Kurdish. He is the author of the most comprehensive report on the resolution of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey, titled "Leaving the Mountain: How may the PKK lay down arms: Freeing the Kurdish Question from violence.”