Search Results

“... When​ I first visited Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria, early in 2015, it was rapidly expanding. With the help of massive US air-power, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) had just retaken the city of Kobani from Islamic State. YPG fighters were linking together the Kurdish population centres south of the Syrian-Turkish frontier to create a de facto Kurdish state – they called it Rojava ...”

“... Dover​ is popular with reporters on the prowl for Brexit stories. Border Force patrol ships – decked out with high-tech radar sensors and painted navy grey – hug the White Cliffs in pursuit of dinghies carrying immigrants from France: a defiant image of Britain repelling an external threat. From the top of one of the hills overlooking the town you look down on the Eastern Docks, where ten thousand lorries stream in and out every day, along with the hordes of cars and caravans and passengers on foot transported on P&O ferries to and from Calais ...”

“... Suha Ahmad​ lives on the outskirts of the port city of Tartus in north-west Syria. Her husband was killed in March while fighting on the government side in the war, her mother and father are dead, and she is the youngest in her impoverished family. ‘When my husband was killed, I was pregnant,’ she said, ‘and my parents-in-law decided to keep me with them and marry me to my husband’s youngest brother, which is the social norm here ...”

“... Iraq​ has just had one of its least violent periods since the US invasion in 2003. Islamic State has been defeated: it lost its last town, Rawa, close to the Syrian border, on 17 November, and surviving IS fighters have retreated to hideouts in the western desert. In the past, IS would respond to military setbacks by putting on a show of strength and stepping up its bombing of easy-to-attack civilian targets ...”

“... The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria over the past 12 years have all involved overt or covert foreign intervention in deeply divided countries. In each case the involvement of the West exacerbated existing differences and pushed hostile parties towards civil war. In each country, all or part of the opposition have been hard-core jihadi fighters ...”

“... America’s​ first act in the war on Iraq was an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein. In the early hours of the morning of 20 March 2003, forty cruise missiles were launched and bunker-buster bombs dropped on a compound on the outskirts of Baghdad where US intelligence wrongly believed him to be staying. Three years later a US airstrike succeeded in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, the organisation that would become Islamic State ...”

“... On the last page​ of his book about his father, Patrick Cockburn writes that Claud ‘disbelieved strongly in the axiom about “telling truth to power”, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions ...”

“... of those who caught it, the doctors knew of none that would make much difference. (In this book, Patrick Cockburn concludes that Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year still offers the soundest advice for those caught in epidemics: run away.) But although this was not Cork’s first epidemic, it was the most vicious. The death toll seems to have ...”

“... to judge from the views of journalists who’ve worked there since the invasion. Our own man Patrick Cockburn believes it’s a ‘great mistake to go with American units and report on any Iraqi city’ because local people can’t talk frankly in front of the military. But Cockburn is clearly outnumbered by ...”

“... fear and despise – and have often underestimated. These events came too late for inclusion in Patrick Cockburn’s book, but they follow the pattern he skilfully sets out in this complex account of the emergence of Muqtada al-Sadr, whom he sees as ‘the most important and surprising figure to emerge in Iraq since the US invasion’. Unusually among ...”

“... forces. Soleimani’s assassination has turned Iranian anger back towards the Great Satan. As Patrick Cockburn explains (in the next piece in this issue), Iran’s leaders were astounded by the millions of mourners who turned out in the streets. Thanks to Trump, a regime that had become increasingly estranged from its own people saw extra­ordinary ...”

“... fighters heading east from northern Syria captured Mosul. Islamic State​ came out of Iraq, as Patrick Cockburn explains: the movement initially called the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), then the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis) or in Iraq and the Levant (Isil), had roots in al-Qaida in Iraq, which, under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, waged sectarian war ...”

“... all the correspondents came back home. You can count the exceptions on the fingers of one hand: Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, one or two others. Iraq’s social infrastructure still isn’t working, years after the occupation ended; it’s been wrecked. The country has been demodernised. The West has destroyed Iraq’s education services and medical ...”

“... Stalinist, alcoholic, sexually ambivalent, Patrick Hamilton had all the prerequisites of a successful Thirties writer. That his success was uneven would seem simply another sign of the times, the mark of an epoch grimly wedded to failure. His work was praised by Greene, Priestley, Lessing, Powell; but if he survives today it is for a couple of memorably macabre dramas – Rope and Gaslight – which Hamilton himself scorned as callow sensationalism ...”

“... that lessons be taken from some ravings in Isaiah and the Book of Revelations. My brother Patrick read the parable of the sower instead. Its lesson of prudent husbandry was spelled out in Watsonville. Was it fate or carpentry that had stricken some houses and spared others? Watsonville is a Third World town, like West Oakland low on the news agenda as ...”