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Robert Fisk: The West is horrified by children's slaughter now. Soon we'll forget

Tue, 29 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Bashar al-Assad will get away with it. He got away with Deraa. He got away with Homs. And he'll get away with Houla. So will the armed opposition to the regime, along with al-Qa'ida and any other outfits joining in Syria's tragedy. Yes, this may be the critical moment, the "tipping point" of horror, when Baathist collapse becomes inevitable rather than probable. And dear Mr Hague may be "absolutely" appalled. The UN, too. We all are.

Robert Fisk: Clinton's $33m raid on Pakistan shows that, in the end, hypocrisy will win

Mon, 28 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

La Clinton hath spoken. Thirty-three million smackers lopped off Pakistan's aid budget because its spooks banged up poor old Dr Shakeel Afridi for 33 years after a secret trial. And, as the world knows, Dr Afridi's crime was to confirm the presence of that old has-been Osama bin Laden in his grotty Abbottabad villa.

Cloud of Syria's war hangs over Lebanese cleric's death

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

There was gunfire at Sheikh Ahmed Abdul-Wahid's funeral in northern Lebanon yesterday, a promise from the Lebanese army that they will investigate his killing – by a soldier – on Sunday, and a heap of appeals for calm from both the military and the government.

Robert Fisk: Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi is dead. Now we'll never know the truth about Lockerbie

Mon, 21 May 2012 09:30:01 +0100

So the old scoundrel has died. Midday Tripoli time, at his home, peacefully, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, after a long struggle with cancer, "bravely borne" no doubt. But "scoundrel", nonetheless, not because he arranged the Lockerbie bombing – many have the gravest doubts he ever did – but because he was a member of Gaddafi's intelligence services and no-one who served the Great Leader as a "mukhabarat" agent had clean hands. If he was wrongly convicted, what did he do in the service of his master? Cliché time: his secret dies with him.

Robert Fisk: The Belfast hotel where you check in but never leave

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Wars never end. Not if you're fighting in them, even reporting them. The Syrian rebellion – or revolution/spring/civil war/awakening – seems unending. "Palestine's" occupation has gone on for 45 years and counting. And when I was sorting my own archives on Northern Ireland the other day, my notebooks, the paramilitary magazines, the pompous announcements from Whitelaw, the Unionists, Paisley, Craig, Hume, the Provos (as Brian Faulkner called them), the Brits – as the Provos first called them, an expression taken up by the ventriloquist Merlyn Rees – it felt like the "Ulster" war should never have ended.

Robert Fisk: Must we stand idly by while world leaders spout this codswallop?

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:00:01 +0100

Funny how the news agenda gets tired. Like the quotes. Only a couple of months ago, we were all bracing for Israel's attack on Iran's nuclear installations. And for serious pressure on Bashar al-Assad to end his "barbaric campaign". I quote Susan Rice, La Clinton's lady at the UN. And now? Well, Bashar lingers in his palace while Iran goes off the boil. Instead, it's the underpants bomber. Or the super-underpants bomber. Or rather the super-underpants bomber who wasn't – because it was a sting operation and a CIA man (or a British agent "of Middle East origin"; choose as you wish) posed as a would-be super-underpants bomber to get hold of the super-underpants bomb so it could be taken to pieces by the lads and lasses in Langley, Virginia.

Robert Fisk: Arab Spring has washed the region's appalling racism out of the news

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

How many tracts, books, documentaries, speeches and doctoral theses have been written and produced about Islamophobia? How many denunciations have been made against the Sarkozys and the Le Pens and the Wilders for their anti-immigration (for which, read largely anti-Muslim) policies or – let us go down far darker paths – against the plague of Breivik-style racism?

Robert Fisk: Did Osama really believe I would polish his image?

Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

O Lordy, lordy. So there's Bin Laden, hiding in Abbottabad and he's waffling on about Fisk.

Robert Fisk: After the Arab Spring, an Islamic Awakening?

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:00:01 +0100

More than a decade and a half ago, I travelled to Holland to meet – in the anonymity of a train station café at Leiden, at his request – one of the most brilliant Arab professors of Islamic thought, Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid.

Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - families fight back

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

"He needs multiple surgery outside Iraq. It's a dysfunctional problem. He has no hearing in his left ear. They told me he has to be six before they can remove cartilage from his chest wall to put in his ear. All operations have to be outside Iraq to beautify the ear and give him his hearing."

Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - the hospital of horrors

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.

Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - Sayef's story

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

For little Sayef, there will be no Arab Spring. He lies, just 14 months old, on a small red blanket cushioned by a cheap mattress on the floor, occasionally crying, his head twice the size it should be, blind and paralysed. Sayeffedin Abdulaziz Mohamed – his full name – has a kind face in his outsized head and they say he smiles when other children visit and when Iraqi families and neighbours come into the room.

Robert Fisk: Iraq's road back from oblivion

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

"Al-Qa'ida killed two of our men here two days ago," the cop said. "Then they called us up to tell us the name of their operation – on a police radio!" We were standing in rebuilt Fallujah, where the police request all foreigners to call by for an escort. We got six, one wearing a ski mask. You get the idea. As a police colonel said later: "Al-Qa'ida [is] still here, they are a nuisance, to me personally when I have to move around the city. But they are not what they were."

Robert Fisk: Counter-revolution – the next deadly chapter

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

It was my old Jordanian-Palestinian chum Rami Khouri who first spotted what is going on in the Middle East right now: it's the counter-revolution. Bahrain is crushing dissent. Syria is crushing dissent. Mubarak's former head of intelligence, the sinister Omar Suleiman, is standing for president in Egypt – the cancellation of his candidacy last week by a dodgy "electoral committee" may well be overturned. Libya is at war with itself. Yemen has got its former dictator's sidekick back. Sixty-one dead in a battle between soldiers and al-Qa'ida last week – in a single day. All in all, a pretty mess.

Robert Fisk: This is politics not sport. If drivers can't see that, they are the pits

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

When the Foreign Office urges British motor racing fans to stay away from Bahrain, this ain't no sporting event, folks, it's a political one. The Bahraini authorities prove it by welcoming sports reporters but refusing visas to other correspondents who want to tell the world what's going on in this minority-run, Saudi-dominated kingdom.

Robert Fisk: The Baghdad street of books that refuses to die

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Saad Tahr Hussein rushes me through the narrow alleyway towards Mutanabbi Street, where the concrete wall in front of the central bank hems in the pedestrians. About a thousand Iraqis briefly see – or don't notice – the sly shade of a Brit as he stumbles down the alley. Then, in the square where the statue of old Marouf al-Rasafi, poet and history-debunker under British colonial rule, glares at the crowds, we turn left into the street of books.

Robert Fisk: Shot in the heart - the journalist Assad made into a martyr

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

They buried Ali Shabaan as a martyr-reporter yesterday, another journalist of the Syrian war to die in action – but a Lebanese this time, unknown in the West but loved in his little south Lebanon village, not least by the girl to whom he was to have become officially engaged this Saturday.

Robert Fisk: Under siege but vicar of Baghdad is still spreading the word

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Andrew White got his blue Iraqi badge on Wednesday – the pass that allows him to move around Baghdad. The Anglican Chaplain to Iraq supported the US invasion – he still thinks Saddam shipped his weapons of mass destruction off to Syria before the Anglo-American armies arrived – and as someone who used an American pass to get about, the end of the occupation must have contained a special irony. "From the day the Americans left, their passes didn't work any more. I couldn't do anything. But now I've got the new Iraqi badge. It's fine."

Robert Fisk: Watch us lead the UN donkey up the Khyber

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0100

So back to THAT BLOODY WAR. I mean not the Syrian one – where we're going to stay hands off – or the Libyan one (where we were hands on, but not touching the ground). Nor the Iraqi one, which is a war at 60-a-day fatalities (pretty much equal with Syria's daily death toll, though we can't make that comparison). Nope. Of course, I mean the Afghan war which we fought in 1842 and in 1878-80 and in 1919 and from 2001 to 2014 (or 2015 or 2016, who knows?). We wouldn't let them down this time, we said about the Afghans – or Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara said – in 2001. Oh yes we will.

Robert Fisk: On Lebanon's border, silent Syrians are flocking to an unknown future

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0100

A poster of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, smiling at each other hangs over the highway to Al-Qaa. But you know this is no ordinary Lebanese village when you arrive at the custom station.

Robert Fisk: Living on the edge of Syria's bloody war

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Syria's bloodbath is carving further divisions in Lebanon as President Bashar al-Assad's Lebanese allies and enemies shout more and more insults at each other. The Christians have even divided among themselves, the old Phalangist leadership calling for Assad's overthrow while the Catholic Maronite church performs its old role of fence-sitting on behalf of Syria's minority Christians.

Robert Fisk: When did we stop caring about meaning?

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

I've been clipping my way these past weeks through a great pile of newspapers filed away from my days as a reporter in Northern Ireland. Rather dull Fisk pieces, I must say, but – turning to old copies of the review sections of the pre-Guardian Observer and the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times – I have been quite taken aback by the quality of the critics. These were the days when you could find Graham Greene reviewing books and Malcolm Muggeridge and AJP Taylor. Do we have writers of this talent reviewing today? Is our writing getting worse? I've made no secret that I suspect the internet and text messaging have damaged literacy.

Robert Fisk: Madness is not the reason for this massacre

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.

Robert Fisk: Condemn me, but get your facts right first

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Here we go again. This libellous and racist quotation comes from an email sent to The Independent by "Bernadette", a member of a pro-Israeli lobby group in Australia.

Robert Fisk: Is Homs an echo of what happened in Srebrenica?

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

No entry to the International Red Cross. Not yet. Maybe in a few days, when the area has been secured. Men and boys separated from the women and children. Streams of refugees. Women, children, the old, few males. Stories of men being loaded on to trucks and taken away. Destination unknown. Devastation. No journalists, no freedom of movement for the UN. The place was called Srebrenica.

Robert Fisk: The fearful realities keeping the Assad regime in power

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

In my 1912 Baedeker guide to Syria, a page and a half is devoted to the city of Homs. In tiny print, it says that, "in the plain to the south-east, you come across the village of Baba Amr. A visit to the arcaded bazaar is worthwhile – here you will find beautiful silks. To the north of Homs, on a square, there is an artillery barracks..." The bazaar has long since been demolished, though the barracks inevitably passed from Ottoman into French and ultimately into Baathist hands; for 27 days last month, this bastion has been visiting hell on what was once the village of Baba Amr.

Robert Fisk: The heroic myth and the uncomfortable truth of war reporting

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

It took a lot of courage to get into Homs; Sky News, then the BBC, then a few brave men and women who went to tell the world of the city's anguish and, in at least two cases, suffered themselves. I could only reflect this week, however, how well we got to know the name of the indomitable and wounded British photographer Paul Conroy, and yet how little we know about the 13 Syrian volunteers who were apparently killed by snipers and shellfire while rescuing him. No fault of Conroy, of course. But I wonder if we know the names of these martyrs – or whether we intend to discover their names?

Robert Fisk: Jailed in Geneva - the colonel who stood up against Mubarak, but refused to spy for the Swiss

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

He is 54 but looks 70 – "like an Indian yogi with a long white beard," as ex-Colonel Mohamed el-Ghanem's Swiss lawyer puts it. "I entered his cell – I had a Swiss official next to me who formally introduced me. Colonel Ghanem was sitting on his bed with his feet on the floor. Then he lay on the bed and pulled the blanket up to his chin. He did not say a word – not a single word. For much of the time, he shut his eyes."

Robert Fisk: The regime calls it 'cleaning', but the dirty truth is plain to see

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

So it's the "cleaning" of Baba Amr now, is it? "Tingheef" in Arabic. Did that anonymous Syrian government official really use that word to the AP yesterday? It's a chilling expression, one that always precedes a lot of killing. And the UN says it's 7,600 so far. The Israelis used the same word in English when they stormed into Lebanon in 1982 (total dead about 17,500). Five months earlier, when the Syrians were finishing off the Muslim insurgents of Hama, just north of Homs (more than 10,000, possibly 15,000 dead), they said they were "researching" the area, "searching", "investigating". The word they used was "bahagh".

Robert Fisk: The new Cold War has already started – in Syria

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

If Iran obtains nuclear weapons capability, "I think other nations across the Middle East will want to develop nuclear weapons".

Robert Fisk: 'If only Hague and Clinton would listen to Yusuf Islam'

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

The uprisings here..." Cat Stevens (or Yusuf Stevens or Yusuf Islam or whatever) began. And the Lebanese audience went as wild as the wild world. They chorused his name. They stood and shouted and clapped. That one word "uprisings" had not a magical effect but a cathartic one, perhaps a kind of drug; it touched everyone. Yusuf Stevens or Yusuf Islam – you'll have to get used to this – stood on the Beirut stage in front of more than a thousand Lebanese. He was scarcely an hour's drive from the Syrian border, an hour and a half from Damascus. No one needed the message spelled out.

Poisoned spring: revolution brings Tunisia more fear than freedom

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Want to remember what Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was like? Just walk down the Avenue Habib-Bourguiba – until a few weeks ago still cordoned off by armoured vehicles and barbed wire – and drop by your local bookshop for Z's wonderful Révolution! Des années mauves à la fuite de Carthage. Z always painted Ben Ali's sycophants purple; his cartoons were the joy of the revolution, Ben Ali's bloated relatives flaunting their new shopping malls while the people – 96 per cent of whom were always said to be Ben Ali's secret police – are beaten by thugs in black uniforms and shades. Ben Ali receives support even from his telephone, his lampshade and the national flag in his office until he does a bunk on his jet while flunkies load aboard chests of cash along with the ginger family cat. Even the press get a run for their money.

Robert Fisk: I've lost a good, brave, honourable friend

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Tewfik Mishlawi was the first Palestinian to report for The Times.

Robert Fisk: John McCarthy knows the value of history

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

How come people like historical memory holes?

Robert Fisk: Could there be some bad guys among the rebels too?

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

John McCain backed the good guys in Libya, who are now keenly torturing their opponents to death.

Robert Fisk: From Washington this looks like Syria's 'Benghazi moment'. But not from here

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

President Bashar al-Assad is not about to go. Not yet. Not, maybe, for quite a long time. Newspapers in the Middle East are filled with stories about whether or not this is Assad's "Benghazi moment" – these reports are almost invariably written from Washington or London or Paris – but few in the region understand how we Westerners can get it so wrong. The old saw has to be repeated and repeated: Egypt was not Tunisia; Bahrain was not Egypt; Yemen was not Bahrain; Libya was not Yemen. And Syria is very definitely not Libya.

Robert Fisk: History keeps repeating itself – as do clichés

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Same Old Story. Journalists shouldn't use the phrase, but what else can I say when I prowl through press reports? Take the following. "It is slowly dawning... that the Americans are really going home, that there will be a ceasefire in this country soon, and then a march to the US... planes." Iraq? Nope. Afghanistan? You'd be so lucky.

Robert Fisk: An attack on Tehran would be madness. So don't rule it out

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

If Israel really attacks Iran this year, it – and the Americans – will be more dotty than their enemies think. True, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a crackpot, but then so is Avigdor Lieberman, who is apparently the Israeli Foreign Minister. Maybe the two want to do each other a favour. But why on earth would the Israelis want to bomb Iran and thus bring down on their heads the fury of both the Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas at the very same moment? Along with Syria, no doubt. Not to mention sucking the West – Europe and the US – into the same shooting match.

Robert Fisk: Syria is used to the slings and arrows of friends and enemies

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

The violence grows worse. The Arab League throws up its hands in despair. Madame Clinton may huff and puff at the United Nations. But the Syrian regime and the stalwarts of the old Baath party don't budge. Only the Arabs are unsurprised. For Syria – the "Um al-Arabia wahida", the Mother of One Arab People, as the Baathists would have it – is a tough creature, its rulers among the most tenacious in the Middle East, used to the slings and arrows of their friends as well as their enemies. Syria's "No" to anything but total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in return for peace is almost as famous as De Gaulle's "No" to British entry to the European Union.