Syria

Thursday

Andrew J.

Kaiser Donald

 Massachusetts All politicians wear masks. Donald Trump’s favourite is that of Maximum Leader. It was on display during this past week. ‘If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will,’ he said at the weekend, ahead of his meeting with Xi Jinping — a throwaway comment that could end up causing mayhem in the Far East. Next, his reaction to news of a chemical bombing in Syria. Trump blamed the atrocity on his predecessor’s ‘weakness and irresolution’, suggesting that he is keen to show the world what strength and resolve look like. The President, it seems, is not too dissimilar to the nightmare his political enemies warned us

Thursday

The Spectator

Saving the children

When a humanitarian tragedy disappears from our newspapers, there are two possibilities: that the crisis is over and life for survivors is gradually returning to normal — or that the human toll has become so routine as to no longer be considered newsworthy. Sadly, the deaths of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean to seek a new life in Europe fall into the latter category. Eighteen months after the photographs of little Alan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish beach generated a huge swell of public emotion, entire families are still dying on a regular basis. In the first ten weeks of

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Aid isn’t working

On this week’s podcast, we consider how refugees could be better aided, whether David Cameron might be envious of George Osborne’s ‘retirement’, and why getting trolled can be good for your career. First, as the government ends the Dubs amendment scheme, we ask whether there are better solutions to the refugee crisis. Paul Collier writes this week’s cover piece, arguing against camps and in favour of getting refugees into jobs, as soon as humanely possible. Paul joins the podcast this week, along with Kevin Watkins CEO of Save the Children. As Paul writes in the magazine: “Refugees nowadays do not have the luxury of a short-term solution. The problems they are fleeing are likely to

Paul Collier

The camps don’t work

The civil war in Syria, and the resulting displacement of half the population, has been the tragedy of our times. We cannot turn our backs on the ten million people who have been forced to flee their homes. Every decent society knows this and knows that it’s our moral duty to come up with a workable way of helping the refugees. But while the scale of the displacement is substantial, it is not unmanageable. The 21st century should be capable of dealing with such catastrophes and we must prepare ourselves actually to do so. To rise to the challenge, we need to combine the instinctive compassion that mass suffering arouses

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Israel Notebook | 16 March 2017

On the Israeli side of the Syrian border, near al-Quneitra, you can watch the war. From my vantage point on the hill, I see a town held by Jabhat al-Nusra and another held by Nusra’s enemy, Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Behind a hill in the distance, I’m told by my Israeli guide, is an area controlled by Isis. Near a road blockade, a sign reads ‘Mortal Danger. Any person who passes endangers his life’ — a point reinforced by the rumble of mortars exploding and the screams that follow. I’ve never heard anything like it. The photographer I’m with is braver than me, or perhaps more foolish. He ventures past the

Thursday

Peter Carty

Descent into hell

In my work as a reviewer, a small, steady proportion of all the books publishers send me concern the Holocaust. With middle age has come a curious foreshortening of my perspective on modern history so that, paradoxically, the Nazis’ inhumanity has begun to seem less distant in time and, therefore, more horrible still. Fortunately I can reassure myself that, objectively, it happened long ago and that even the atrocities of eastern Europe and Rwanda are now a couple of decades safely in the past. Such consolations vanish when confronted by The Raqqa Diaries, which is shockingly of the present. It is a terrible reminder that we are unwise to impute

Thursday

Seth J. Frantzman

Syria is a world war without a solution

The Afghans on the road in Serbia were wet from the rain. They were trying to hitch a ride into the border town of Presevo to make the way north to Hungary. Later I saw them sitting next to a train station drying their socks. Did they fear for the future? ‘This is nothing, we came from Syria,’ one of them said. That was in 2015 at the height of the refugee crisis as more than a million people sought refuge in the EU. Many of them had fled the conflict in Syria. But the traffic of people was not all in the same direction: Afghans, Lebanese, Tunisians, Uighurs from China, Hazaras

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Spectator podcast: Isis’s last stand

On this week’s podcast, we discuss what the end of Isis means for a fragile Middle East, debate whether John Bercow should be packing his bags, and ask if the days of the Bullingdon Club have finally ended. First, the attempt by ISIS to establish a Caliphate has been on the rocks for some time, and with President Trump now at the tiller of the US military, its days may be numbered. Trump wants to retake the Syrian city of Raqqa quickly, but, in order to do so, he might have to rewrite the cautious approach of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Paul Wood writes about the situation in this week’s magazine cover piece,

Paul Wood

‘Isis? Bomb those suckers’

These are the last days of the ‘caliphate’. The place Isis made their capital, Raqqa, in Syria, is encircled and cut off. They have already lost half of Mosul in Iraq, their largest city. Really, what did they expect? This was inevitable from the moment Isis declared war on everyone not in Isis. Defeat was even foreseen by one of the group’s leading thinkers, Abu al-Farouq al-Masri. ‘Announcing enmity to the world will strangle the caliphate in its cradle,’ he said last year. ‘This will bury our project alive.’ Al Masri (the ‘Egyptian’) is or was an elderly cleric and he was delivering a sermon in Raqqa meant as a

Thursday

The Spectator

No, he didn’t

The irony of Barack Obama’s presidency is that while it began at a time when it seemed America’s fortunes could only improve, his inauguration day turned out to be his personal high water mark. The retiring President’s speech in Chicago this week contained flashes of the optimism that he brought to a country and a world which was reeling from the banking crisis and mired in the deepest recession since the 1930s. It recalled the sense of hope that he would lift America’s reputation abroad, shattered as it was by the Iraq war. Yet eight years on, even Obama’s keenest supporters are struggling to answer: what exactly is his legacy?

Thursday

Ed West

The truth behind Germany’s ‘Mein Kampf’ sales boom

A dead white man called Adolf Hitler has sold nearly 100,000 copies of his memoir, Mein Kampf, since a new edition was published last year in Germany. The book wasn’t officially banned in the country, but the copyright was owned by the state of Bavaria which prevented new editions being made. I have to admit to never having read Mein Kampf, largely because I’m quite small-minded and if everyone says a book is terrible I can’t be bothered to try it.  Hitler wasn’t much of a thinker; even his many detractors would admit he was more of a doer. So what explains the renewed success of his book in Germany? Is this

Monday

Julie Burchill

Daft celebrity mourners have made 2016 the year of the ‘Tearleader’

Despite my ‘difficult’ reputation, I am a cheery cove in real life, all the more so as I get older. But in true Dorian Grey style, I only stay this way by letting my intolerant side rule the roost on Facebook. Every morning my hot little hands positively itch to unfollow, defriend and block: a day which passes without binning a few dim bulbs is a day wasted. I’ve had an especially good run of it this year, as two things in particular have acted as cracking prompts for my ‘negging‘ narrative. One has been the showing of bad attitude on the part of many Remain-supporting mates. I don’t expect

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

By focusing on Assad’s grim regime, MPs are ignoring a greater evil

Well, is it our fault? George Osborne has repeated his claim, which he has made already, that the situation in Aleppo did not ‘come out of a vacuum’ but was due to a ‘vacuum of Western and British leadership’. Specifically he was taking issue with the Commons’ vote three years ago not to back airstrikes on the Assad regime on account of its use of chemical weapons – you know, Barack Obama’s red line issue. There’s a lot of this kind of thing around. The Commons yesterday was in full blown tearful mode yesterday in the debate on Aleppo called by Andrew Mitchell in the course of which George emerged

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Britain’s foreign policy is now dictated by our politicians’ feelings

The ‘price of non-intervention’ is becoming one of those awful Westminster clichés. It is a phrase which, we can be sure, will be used to justify another half-cocked and disastrous military intervention in the not-too-distant future. There is growing consensus among the political class that, had wicked Ed Miliband not scuppered brave David Cameron and George Osborne’s plans to throw some bombs at the Syrian problem in 2013, the horrors of Aleppo would have been averted. Some nice, clean surgical air strikes would have sorted out that whole President Assad problem. But Parliament got cold feet, and as a result the people of Aleppo are dying, horribly. So, shame on you non-interventionists — you have

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

On Syria, it is easier for MPs to reflect on their past mistakes than confront the present

Whose fault is the bloodshed in Aleppo? Yesterday the House of Commons discussed this at some length in an emergency debate on the onslaught by Syrian and Russian planes on the city. One of the most powerful speeches came from George Osborne who spoke about the impact that the 2013 Commons vote had on Syria and on American politics. It is worth reading in full. ‘Of course, once this House of Commons took its decision, I believe it did have an impact on American politics,’ he told MPs. ‘We cannot have it both ways – we cannot debate issues such as Syria and then think that our decisions have no

Peter Oborne

It’s time to judge Assad’s Aleppo campaign by the standards that we set ourselves in Mosul

For the past few weeks, British newspapers have been informing their readers about two contrasting battles in the killing grounds of the Middle East. One is Mosul, in northern Iraq, where western reporters are accompanying an army of liberation as it frees a joyful population from terrorist control. The other concerns Aleppo, just a few hundred miles to the west. This, apparently, is the exact opposite. Here, a murderous dictator, hellbent on destruction, is waging war on his own people. Both these narratives contain strong elements of truth. There is no question that President Assad and his Russian allies have committed war crimes, and we can all agree that Mosul

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Boris Johnson is right about Saudi Arabia

In what sense does anyone actually disagree with what Boris Johnson said about Saudi Arabia and Iran? Does anyone actually think that his observation that they are both engaged in ‘puppeteering’ in Syria and Yemen is not only true, but understates the seriousness of the problem? Does anyone believe the Foreign Office when it says that Mr Johnson’s remarks do not reflect the position of the Government? Now I know the argument, viz, that Saudi Arabia is an important and very sensitive ally and the way to deal with its sensitivities is to make criticism in private, which is what, we are invited to believe, Theresa May did when she

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

Can this sweet little girl get out of Aleppo alive?

Every morning, after the children go to school, I turn on my computer to check that Bana Alabed is alive and unharmed. I do the same at night. I have never met Bana. She is a sweet-faced, skinny seven-year-old girl who tweets from rebel-held east Aleppo with the help of her mother, Fatemah, an English teacher. Last weekend, as the Syrian government, Russian and Hezbollah forces took over north-eastern Aleppo amid heavy bombardments, Bana tweeted: ‘Tonight we have no house. It’s bombed and I got in rubble. I saw deaths and nearly died.’ As she and her family contemplated their rapidly narrowing options, Bana wrote to her escalating number of

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

The Syria debate has become dangerously partisan

The collective hysteria about the impending fall of eastern Aleppo to government forces strikes me as understandable and laudable only up to a point. If the advance of Assad’s forces on the rebel-held part of Aleppo means, as the French government suggested, the biggest massacre of civilians since the Second World War, then obviously it would be a very bad thing. But the spectacle of MPs and the BBC presenting the conflict as Assad and Putin’s lot trying to kill or starve little girls (there’s an eight-year-old whose tweets from Aleppo are widely circulated) and their mums without mentioning the overall nature of the conflict, strikes me as partial at

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 17 November 2016

The Israeli chef and I have become firm friends since he moved out of my flat. He has his own place now, and is trying to find a job. I take him horse riding at the weekends. On the way down the A3 he asks me all sorts of questions about his new life in Britain and the things he is struggling to make sense of. Like why he can’t get a work visa. He is very upset about this. ‘You have to understand,’ I explain, ‘that the mistake you made was to come here legally and apply to the system honestly and openly, stating clearly that you wanted to