When I started this blog, more than eight years ago, it was out of a need to connect American breeders and lovers of desert Arabian horses with facts, stories, and like-minded people from the rest of the world. I believe this task has now largely been fulfilled, not necessarily by this blog, but mostly by the advent of social media tools that connect people across the globe. With the endless loss of life, heritage, culture and horses engulfing the Middle East — Syria, Iraq, Yemen, others maybe soon — I have been feeling the increasing need to switch gears and reach out to those who live in the cradle of the Arabian horses, especially the youth. Amidst these tragedies, those who are normally the reference and the source of the knowledge, expertise, tradition about desert horses, and the original source of the horses themselves, are at risk of losing faith in what they have and in who they are. So pervasive is the influence of Western lifestyles, media, ideas, so overwhelming is the destruction of ancient centers of knowledge, tradition and culture — including about Arabian horses like Aleppo, Homs, Mossul, Sanaa, so large is the flow of refugees who lost everything, that the time has come…