Patrick Cockburn

In​ the late morning of 30 April 1980, I left my flat at 90 Westbourne Terrace, near Paddington Station, to walk across Kensington Gardens to the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate. I wanted a visa to visit Iran, where the US raid to rescue staff held hostage in its embassy in Tehran had failed disastrously a few days earlier. As I walked, trying to work out what to say to the Iranian press...

In October​ last year the number of people infected with Covid-19 began to rise in the coastal towns of north-east Kent. The area had escaped the full impact of the first wave of the pandemic in the spring, with many residents saying that they didn’t know anyone who had caught the virus. After the end of the lockdown on 4 July, there was a sense that the crisis was over and there...

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, IS has killed 1010 government soldiers and supporters in the area west of the Euphrates since March 2019. On 30 December, IS fighters ambushed buses carrying Syrian soldiers and paramilitaries, killing 37 of them. It’s unlikely that IS will ever be able to resurrect itself as it once was. It is too feared; it made too many enemies. It has lost the advantage of surprise and probably of covert support from foreign governments. But this doesn’t mean that Sunni Arab jihadi fundamentalism, not very different from IS in beliefs and behaviour, is finished. Syrian Arab militiamen, paid for and under the orders of the Turkish army, who have carried out ethnic cleansing against Kurds and Yazidis in northern Syria, aren’t much different from IS. Both Syria and Iraq are increasingly unstable and impoverished. Both have been badly hit by the coronavirus epidemic, at a time when the Syrian economy is being devastated by American sanctions and the Iraqi economy by the fall in the price of oil. As the chaos deepens, IS has a chance, probably in some new guise, to rise again.

The strategy​ of waging economic rather than military war is hardly new. But under Trump it has become the primary weapon of American foreign policy. Despite all his bombastic threats against perceived enemies, he has yet to start a single war in the Middle East or anywhere else, relying more on the power of the US Treasury than the Pentagon. From an American point of view sanctions have much to recommend them: no need for the costly and risky military ventures that have so often gone wrong in the past. Unlike airstrikes, sanctions can be presented as a non-violent way of influencing the behaviour of toxic regimes for the better. In reality, as with the Caesar Act, they are the bluntest of instruments, inflicting communal punishment indiscriminately on whole societies. Arguments justifying the Caesar Act are much the same as those once used to sell UN sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, imposed after he invaded Kuwait in 1990 and kept in place for the next 13 years.

Thanington​ is a deprived area beside the River Stour on the western outskirts of Canterbury. Before the pandemic many people here were working on zero-hour contracts as cleaners or supermarket shelf-stackers. Many settled Traveller families with a strong sense of solidarity live here, but the level of education in the area is low. Paula Spencer, who runs the local community centre, told me...