The British government purports to be re-establishing the UK as an independent nation state by leaving the EU, but British power and ability to decide its own policies are continuing to ebb in the real…
Category: Patrick Cockburn
Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent. He has written four books on the country’s recent history. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006 and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009. He has written three books on Iraq. He won the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009 for his coverage of Iraq and his son’s schizophrenia. In 2010, He won a Peace through Media award from the International Council for Press and Broadcasting at the sixth annual International Media Awards.
It is fortunate for Saudi Arabia and Qatar that the furore over the sexual antics of Donald Trump is preventing much attention being given to the latest batch of leaked emails to and from Hillary Clinton. Most fascinating of these is what reads like a US State Department memo, dated 17 August 2014, on the appropriate US response to the rapid advance of Isis forces, which were then sweeping through northern Iraq and eastern Syria. At the time, the US government was not admitting that Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies were supporting Isis and al-Qaeda-type movements. But in the leaked memo, which says that it draws on “western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region” there is no ambivalence about who is backing Isis, which at the time of writing was butchering and raping Yazidi villagers and slaughtering captured Iraqi and Syrian soldiers.
Kurdish forces, close to sealing the border, must beware – President Erdogan is unpredictable A month before Turkey shot down a Russian bomber which it accused of entering its airspace, Russian military intelligence had warned…
World View: New claims say Ankara worked with the US and Britain to smuggle Gaddafi’s guns to rebel groups The US’s Secretary of State John Kerry and its UN ambassador, Samantha Power have been pushing for more assistance to be given to the Syrian rebels. This is despite strong evidence that the Syrian armed opposition are, more than ever, dominated by jihadi fighters similar in their beliefs and methods to al-Qa’ida. The recent attack by rebel forces around Latakia, northern Syria, which initially had a measure of success, was led by Chechen and Moroccan jihadis. America has done its best to keep secret its role in supplying the Syrian armed opposition, operating through proxies and front companies. It is this which makes Seymour Hersh’s article “The Red Line and The Rat Line: Obama, Erdogan and the Syrian rebels” published last week in the London Review of Books, so interesting.
Its government has no real power; militias are ever more entrenched, and now the state itself is under threat The Libyan former prime minister Ali Zeidan fled last week after parliament voted him out of…
Beirut – A long-awaited peace conference on Syria is likely to go ahead without one of the major participants of the conflict after the United Nations withdrew an invitation to Iran to attend the talks…
World View: Compromise is no longer feasible, and the army controls the levers of power. But can its victory be conclusive? All parties in Egypt have overplayed their hands in the two and a half…
In Northern Ireland it used to be called “the politics of the last atrocity”, when the latest act of violence and the retaliation it provoked dictated the direction of day-to-day politics. Syria has travelled far…
The air is full of dire warnings of an impending Israeli attack on Iran. Prophets of doom declare themselves full of forebodings and point fearfully to the meeting in the White House between President Barack…
“The US has an army of 90,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and is spending $100 billion a year, but has still been unable to defeat 20,000-25,000 Taliban who receive no pay at all.” The United…