Syria

Thursday

Taki

High life | 3 November 2016

Sixty years ago this week all hell broke loose: Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest and put down a nationalist uprising in a very bloody manner. Down south Anglo-French paratroopers jumped into the Sinai and, in cahoots with the Israelis, took over the Suez Canal in a last gasp of colonialism by the Europeans. And in Washington DC a very peed-off President Eisenhower ordered the Anglo-French to go home or else. They went home and only the Israelis howled that Ike was an anti-Semite and many other things. And where was your intrepid foreign (future High life) correspondent while all this was going on? On an aeroplane flying from New York

Peter Oborne

A tale of two battles

For the past few weeks, British news-papers 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

James Delingpole

The lying game | 27 October 2016

‘Adam Curtis believed that 200,000 Guardian readers watching BBC2 could change the world. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he had created the televisual equivalent of a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge with pretentions to narrative coherence…’ You really must watch Ben Woodhams’s brilliant 2011 Adam Curtis-pastiche mini-documentary The Loving Trap, which you’ll find on YouTube. It’s so devastatingly cruel, funny and accurate that when I first saw it I speculated that Curtis would never be able to work again. But this was fantasy. Of course, I knew that Curtis would be back, not least because to be parodied in this way is not an insult but a sure sign

Saturday

Rod Liddle

We’re too busy vilifying Putin and Russia to notice our own misdeeds

I have been wondering these last few weeks whether it would be cheaper to excavate a basement and buy a Geiger counter and iodine tablets, or emigrate to New Zealand. Call me frit, but I don’t like the way things are heading. Probably the second option is easier: Armageddon outta here, etc. I can re-enact Nevil Shute’s On the Beach from some rocky cove near Dunedin, waiting for the fallout to arrive. I was sentient only during the latter stages of the Cold War but from what I can remember, the two sides, them and us, behaved for the most part with a degree of rationality and common sense. (I

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 20 October 2016

Russia’s war crimes Sir: In his article ‘Vanity Bombing’ (15 October), Simon Jenkins quivers with contempt at MPs digging ‘deep into the jaded rhetoric of a superannuated great power’ and ‘shouting adjectives and banging drums’. But he does Parliament and decent, careful motivation a deep disservice. I don’t know what preceded his splenetic outburst, but Syrian analysis deserves better. The position is very simple. The Russians are committing war crimes and using their position as a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council to shield themselves from international humanitarian law. They are not bombing formations of Assad’s military; they are hitting hospitals with bunker-busting bombs and attacking civilians cowering in

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Stop the sabre-rattling

I have been wondering these last few weeks whether it would be cheaper to excavate a basement and buy a Geiger counter and iodine tablets, or emigrate to New Zealand. Call me frit, but I don’t like the way things are heading. Probably the second option is easier: Armageddon outta here, etc. I can re-enact Nevil Shute’s On the Beach from some rocky cove near Dunedin, waiting for the fallout to arrive. I was sentient only during the latter stages of the Cold War but from what I can remember, the two sides, them and us, behaved for the most part with a degree of rationality and common sense. (I

Monday

Seth J. Frantzman

Iraq’s endgame: The battle for Mosul

At night, the temperature around the Islamic State-held city of Mosul drops to around 80°F. At the Bashiqa front line, 15 miles northeast of the city, it would feel pleasant and almost calm, were it not for the steady sound of exploding shells. Most of life is tea and cigarettes. It’s like a quiet day on the Western Front, minus the mud. ‘It’s so peaceful you can’t imagine what’s happening — it’s surreal,’ says Allan Duncan, a former soldier with the Royal Irish Regiment who volunteered to join the Kurdish peshmerga here two years ago in order to fight Isis. ‘You almost forget that things are so close to the

Thursday

Simon Jenkins

Vanity bombing

‘When you’ve shouted Rule Britannia, when you’ve sung God Save the Queen, when you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth…’ So wrote Kipling derisively of the domestic cheerleaders of the Boer War. The lines came to mind this week as the Commons again strained at the leash of war. Horrified by the Aleppo atrocities, MPs dug deep into the jaded rhetoric of a superannuated great power. They vied for abuse to hurl at the Syrian and Russian forces laying siege to the wretched city. There were the obligatory parallels with Hitler. The Tory MP Andrew Mitchell, spoke of ‘events that match the behaviour of the Nazi regime in Guernica’. He

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

Let’s not forget that Russia is still the lesser evil in Syria

It’s a funny feeling, I have to say, to find myself, again, on the same side as the Stop the War Coalition. But you know what? Looks like neither of us is going to be turning up for a demo outside the Russian embassy to protest about its actions in Syria, as the Foreign Secretary was recommending in yesterday’s Commons debate on Syria. ‘Where is Stop the War Coalition at the moment?’ Boris Johnson demanded, in an apparent attempt to outdo the anti-war lot in humanitarian outrage. He did, however, seem a bit more reserved about one suggestion raised in the debate, that the UK should actually police a no-fly

Steerpike Steerpike

Stop the War stay away from the Russian embassy – ‘we won’t contribute to the jingoism and hysteria’

Although little was agreed upon in yesterday’s debate on Aleppo with regards to a no-fly zone, one thing the Foreign Secretary did suggest was that the public stage mass protests outside the Russian embassy. What’s more, Boris Johnson queried just why the Stop the War coalition had failed to do this as of yet. So, why has the anti-war group — formerly chaired by Jeremy Corbyn — refrained from getting out on the streets to protest Russia’s actions in Syria? Well, because they are not the West — obviously. Although the group — which one compared Assad to Churchill, and defended Russia’s invasion of Georgia — were very active in opposing Britain’s plans for air

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Aleppo, what can be done?

There was a sombre mood in the chamber this afternoon as MPs gathered to discuss the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Aleppo. After Russian planes dropped bombs that destroyed a UN aid convoy, Andrew Mitchell called for the Commons debate — drawing parallels between Russia’s disregard for international law today and the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy in the 1930s. Supporting Mitchell’s call for a no-fly zone, Labour’s Alison McGovern gave an emotional speech as she urged the government to do so ‘if it can be shown to be an effective way to protect civilians’. Referring to her late friend Jo Cox, McGovern — the co-chair of the friends of Syria group —

Monday

Katy Balls

Jeremy Corbyn in the firing line over Russia at PLP meeting

Although Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman described tonight’s meeting of the PLP as barely registering on the Richter scale in terms of hostility, it could hardly be described as an hour of sweetness and light. While the meeting appeared to get off to a good start with loud cheers that could be heard from the corridor, it later transpired that the applause was for Rosie Winterton — the chief whip Corbyn sacked — rather than the Labour leader himself. When Corbyn praised Winterton for her work in the role over the past six years, he was heckled by MPs who questioned why he had fired Winterton if he really thought so much

Thursday

Nick Hilton

The Spectator podcast: Syrian nightmare

The Syrian initiative to retake the last remaining rebel stronghold of Aleppo, following a two week ceasefire, has proved controversial in the international community. Images of children bloodied, bruised and painted with masonry dust have decorated the front pages of British newspapers, but is there anything that can help ease the pain of ‘Syria’s Guernica’? These are the issues raised in Paul Wood’s cover piece this week. Speaking to the podcast from Washington, he said: “This has been going on for five years now and there have been surges from both sides. We happen to be in the middle of a surge by the regime attempting to take the last

Paul Wood

Syrian nightmare

‘We are used to death,’ said Ismail. He had been to the funerals of four friends in a single week, all killed by aerial bombs. ‘We’re used to bloodshed. We’re adapted to the situation and this style of life now. It’s normal. If you lose someone, then the next day you say, OK, life must go on.’ Ismail spoke to me from eastern-Aleppo, where as many as 250,000 people are under siege by the Syrian regime and ‘living on rice’, as he described it. He is in his late twenties and is one of the White Helmets, the civil defence volunteers who dig people out of the rubble after an

Thursday

The Spectator

Deadly silence

There was a time when the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo would have featured strongly in political debate in Britain. Just two weeks after a negotiated ceasefire appeared to have provided some respite, a war of attrition in Syria’s second largest city is escalating into a vast human tragedy. Last Saturday, a bomb dropped by Syrian government forces knocked out a pumping station which had been supplying water to two million people, 250,000 of whom are besieged in the rebel-held east of the city. On the same day, at least 45 people, many of them children, were killed by barrel bombs dropped indiscriminately on civilians — a now common occurrence. Food

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 29 September 2016

Home Sir Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, said that Britain would oppose attempts to create an EU army, as it would ‘undermine’ Nato. Forecasts for British economic growth in 2016 collated by the Treasury were revised from 1.5 to 1.8 per cent, the level expected in June, before the EU referendum. Mathias Döpfner, the chief executive of Axel Springer, said that leaving the European Union would make Britain ‘better off than continental Europe’ within five years. Scotland began importing shale gas from the United States. Fourteen candidates are to stand in the by-election at Witney on October 20 to replace David Cameron as MP, including one from the Bus-Pass Elvis

Will Cohu

The fallen Angel

Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian-born businessman, a son-in-law to Nasser and a political high-flyer in the administration of Sadat, who fell off the balcony of his flat in Carlton House Terrace, central London, in June 2007. His death was watched with incredulity by business colleagues assembled in an office across the road, who recalled seeing two burly, possibly Middle-eastern figures framed in the tableau. Investigations were inconclusive. Marwan, then in his sixties, wasn’t well, but hadn’t seemed suicidal. On the other hand, he had been afraid, and with good reason, because plenty of people wanted him dead. Marwan had been a spy. That seems to be the most concrete element

Thursday

Paul Wood

Bombs astray

Soon, soon, you will see a wondrous sight,’ says the Isis anthem, ‘for your destruction, my sword has been sharpened. We march by night, to cut and behead… We make the streets run red with blood, from the stabbing of the bayonets, from the striking of the necks, on the assembly of the dogs.’ The people of the Syrian town of Deir Ezzor were left in no doubt that they were the dogs in question. This nasheed — or chant — was posted on the internet, played over video from Syrian state TV of Deir Ezzor residents criticising the Isis siege. The message was clear. That was at the beginning

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 15 September 2016

Home Schools in England would have the right to select pupils by ability, under plans outlined by Theresa May, the Prime Minister. New grammar schools would take quotas of poor pupils or help run other schools, a Green Paper proposed. ‘We already have selection in our school system — and it’s selection by house price, selection by wealth. That is simply unfair,’ Mrs May said in a speech. Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, said the idea that poor children would benefit from a return of grammar schools was ‘tosh’. Oversubscribed Catholic schools which wished to expand would be able to choose all their additional pupils on grounds

Saturday

Rose Asani

After years of desperation, at last there is a glimmer of hope in Syria

Sat on the dusty ground with the heat of the sun beating down on her, Nur looked exhausted. Arms wrapped around her knees, head bowed. I wondered if she had the energy to even get up again. Next to her was a suitcase and a couple of plastic bags, her whole life packed away. Three young children huddled behind her, their hands clutching at the back of their mothers clothes. Tiny, frail young lives who have witnessed conflict and terrors unimaginable. The eldest, a girl, looked up at me as I approached. Big eyes set in a hollow face stared out and through me without a flicker of emotion.  It