[2] During his training in the Parachute Regiment in 1971, aged 18, Asher's best friend, Steve Parkin, also 18, was mortally wounded next to him during a "live firing exercise", and died the same night.
[2] In his first vacation he bought a camel and travelled about 1500 miles (2,400 km) across Kordofan and Darfur, joining up with a camel-herd being taken north to Egypt along the ancient trade-route known as the Darb al-Arbaʿīn (Forty Days Road).
[2] On a visit to Khartoum in 1985, Asher was asked by UNICEF Sudan to organize a camel caravan in the Red Sea Hills to take aid to Beja people cut off by drought and famine.
[9] During this expedition, Asher met Italian photographer and Arabist Mariantonietta Peru, with whom he subsequently embarked on a 4,500-mile (7,200 km) West-to-East trek across the Sahara on foot and camel-back,[2] a trip that became the subject of the book, Impossible Journey.
He ran the project - a rural rehabilitation programme - from Port Sudan, but travelled frequently in the hills, talking to nomads and staying in their camps.
[12] In 1991, Asher crossed the Western Desert, by camel, from Mersa Matruh on the Mediterranean coast, to Aswan in southern Egypt - a distance of 1,000 miles (1,600 km).
[15] In 2008, Asher returned to Darfur, western Sudan, with a team of researchers, under the aegis of UNEP, to make a study of the Janjaweed horsemen-militias who had been involved in the civil war.
Phillips' family, who had suffered "11 years of torture" due to the calumnies poured on him by 'McNab' and 'Ryan', received an official letter of exoneration from the MOD as a result of Asher's work.
[22] In his current educational activities and writing, Asher is known for stressing the importance of 'interbeing' - the interconnectedness of all things, and harmony with nature, which he says was a feature of nomad society.
[23] Asher is the author of ten novels and fourteen non-fiction works, various of which are published in thirteen languages including Arabic, Chinese, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and Korean.
The non-fiction books include works of travel about his journeys and experiences with nomads in the desert, historical works such as Get Rommel, about Operation Flipper, the British attempt to assassinate Erwin Rommel in Libya in 1941, Sands of Death, about the Flatters expedition of 1881 and the Tuareg, and Khartoum, the Ultimate Imperial Adventure, the story of the fall of Khartoum, the Gordon Relief Expedition and the reconquest of the Sudan.
A 'fictionalized autobiography', based on Asher's actual experiences but condensed into a single journey, the book tells the story of a former SAS soldier, who goes in search of a legendary lost oasis, and, after a series of rites of passage, undergoes a spiritual rebirth.