Click Here for Archive No. 2 - Articles dating from 2005 to 2008

Click Here for all Articles dating from March, 2001 onwards

A Mire of Death, Lies and Atrocities

30 December 2004

Who said this and when? "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient that the public knows... We are today not far from a disaster."

'The Army had not a word of compassion for the dead man, nor for his orphaned sons'

19 December 2004

It was the insouciance, the absolute indifference of the British military press office in Basra that shocked me. Here I had documents--one of them signed by a British officer--stating that Baha Mousa had died in British custody, another that Mousa's colleague had been "assaulted" when he too was a prisoner and suffered "acute renal failure", the statement of his father that the British army waited three days before admitting to the family that he was dead--and the British spokesman said he couldn't help.

Who killed Baha Mousa?

15 December 2004

Baha Mousa, 26, was working as a hotel receptionist in Basra 14 months ago when British troops surrounded the building and arrested seven men. They were taken to a British base and were reportedly hooded and beaten. Two days later, Mousa was dead. His family was given $3,000 in compensation and rejected a further $5,000. What they wanted was justice. Yesterday, after more than a year of official stonewalling, his relatives won a 'historic' ruling to force the MoD to hold an independent inquiry. Will the truth now be known?

What price innocence in the anarchy of Iraq?

17 November 2004

Video shows murder of aid worker Margaret Hassan, says her family

After the grief, the astonishment, heartbreak, anger and fury over the apparent murder of such a good and saintly woman, that is the question that her friends - and, quite possibly, the Iraqi insurgents - will be asking. This Anglo-Irish lady held an Iraqi passport. She had lived in Iraq for 30 years, she had dedicated her life to the welfare of Iraqis in need. She hated the UN sanctions and opposed the Anglo-American invasion. So who killed Margaret Hassan?

Death, delusion and democracy

14 November 2004

That Yasser Arafat's death is seen as sign of optimism shows how catastrophic the conflict in the Middle East has become

So the death of Yasser Arafat is a great new opportunity for the Palestinians, is it? The man who personified the Palestinian struggle - "Mr Palestine" - is dead. So things can only get better for the Palestinians.  

In Egypt, it was as if Arafat was as dangerous in death as in life

13 November 2004

In Heliopolis, the Cairo airport road is lined by plane trees, villas and thick flowerbeds. Yesterday, it was also lined by almost the entire Egyptian police force, thousands on thousands of black-uniformed cops, standing in absolute and total silence.  

The dreamer who relied on emotion and failed to protect his own people

12 November 2004

He was everything loyal and everything miserable about the Palestinian dream. I have a tape recording of Arafat, sitting with me on a cold, dark mountainside outside the Lebanese port of Tripoli in 1983 where the old man - he was always called the old man, long before he was elderly - was under siege by the Syrian army, another of the Arab "brothers" who wanted to lead the Palestinian cause and ended up fighting Palestinians rather than Israelis.

The truth is that Yasser Arafat died years ago

30 October 2004

He married the Revolution. And in the end he became a little dictator, falsely promising democracy.

Yet again, Yasser Arafat is dying. We thought he'd been killed back in 1982 when the Israeli air force flew around Beirut attacking apartment blocks and homes they thought he was visiting. Their bombs tore to pieces hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians but Arafat was never there.

Kidnapped

The heroine who offered hope for Iraq

20 October 2004

Margaret? Margaret Hassan kidnapped? She who said to me that soon, very soon, "there will be more than one lost generation" in Iraq?

Future generations will struggle to escape the legacy of the disaster in Iraq

Our betrayals and broken promises have created a kind of irreversible disease that cannot be forgiven

11 October 2004

I am writing a book about our need to escape from history - or rather about our inability to escape the effects of the decisions taken by our fathers and grandfathers. My father was a soldier in the First World War or, as it says on the back of his campaign medal, "The Great War for Civilisation'' - which is the title I've chosen for my book. In the space of just 17 months after my father's war ended, the victors had drawn the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent all my professional life watching the people inside those borders burn.

Dramatic plea from al-Qa'ida suspect

25 September 2004

One of 11 men still detained without trial under anti-terrorism measures drawn up by the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, made a dramatic and unprecedented appeal last night to the Iraqi kidnappers of Ken Bigley to spare his life.

The worse the situation in Iraq, the bigger the lies that Tony Blair tells us.

25 September 2004

Iraq, remember, was going to be the role model. It would be the catalyst, 'crucible' even, of the new Middle East

We are now in the greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis. That's how we run the Iraq war - or the Second Iraq War as Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would now have us believe. Hostages are paraded in orange tracksuits to remind us of Guantanamo Bay. Kidnappers demand the release of women held prisoner by the Americans. Abu Ghraib is what they are talking about. Abu Ghraib? Anyone remember Abu Ghraib? Remember those dirty little snapshots? But don't worry. This wasn't the America George Bush recognised, and besides we're punishing the bad apples, aren't we? Women? Why, there are only a couple of dames left - and they are "Dr Germ" and "Dr Anthrax".

We should not have allowed 19 murderers to change our world

11 September 2004

So, three years after the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania we were bombing Fallujah. Come again? Hands up those who knew the name of Fallujah on 11 September 2001. Or Samarra. Or Ramadi. Or Anbar province. Or Amarah. Or Tel Afar, the latest target in our "war on terror'' although most of us would find it hard to locate on a map (look at northern Iraq, find Mosul and go one inch to the left). Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.

Saddam's cameraman is still haunted by images of war

05 August 2004

"I vomited," Mouffak Fathi Daoud says, and you have to understand why. Three young soldiers were brought to the trees on the hills outside Sulimaniyah. They had been retreating from the great battle against the Iranians on Jebel Maout. Saddam had ordered that all deserters should be shot. Daoud was one of the Iraqi army's top newsreel cameramen. He didn't have to watch. But he was a witness.

'Can't Blair see that this country is about to explode? Can't Bush?'

01 August 2004

    The Prime Minister has accused some journalists of almost wanting a disaster to happen in Iraq. Robert Fisk, who has spent the past five weeks reporting from the deteriorating and devastated country, says the disaster has already happened, over and over again.

    The war is a fraud. I'm not talking about the weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist. Nor the links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida which didn't exist. Nor all the other lies upon which we went to war. I'm talking about the new lies. 

Protection, not oppression: How the new mobile police patrols have discovered job satisfaction

30 July 2004

Their Kalashnikov automatic rifles regularly jam after firing two bullets, their flak jackets don't protect them, their promised £45 pay increase never arrived, their boss wants to take the air-conditioners from their vehicles and the hospitals can't cope with their wounded.

Iraqi police in the firing line as bombers massacre 70 people hoping to join force

29 July 2004

Yet again, the Iraqi police - and their hordes of impoverished would-be recruits - were massacred yesterday, up to a hundred of them in the Sunni Muslim city of Baquba as they lined up, unprotected, along a boulevard in the hope of finding work.

Unreported war: US document reveals scale of conflict

29 July 2004

Iraq, we are told by Mr Blair, is safer. It is not. US military reports clearly show much of the violence in Iraq is not revealed to journalists, and thus goes largely unreported. This account of the insurgency across Iraq over three days last week provides astonishing proof that Iraq under its new, American-appointed Prime Minister, has grown more dangerous and violent.

Baghdad is a city that reeks with the stench of the dead  (Full Story)

28 July 2004

The smell of the dead pours into the street through the air-conditioning ducts. Hot, sweet, overwhelming. Inside the Baghdad morgue, there are so many corpses that the fridges are overflowing. The dead are on the floor. Dozens of them. Outside, in the 46C (114F) heat, Qadum Ganawi tells me how his brother Hassan was murdered.

Terror by video: How Iraq's kidnappers drew their inspiration from horrors of Chechnya (Full Story)

26 July 2004

The pictures are grainy, the voices sometimes unclear. But when Kim Sun-il shrieks "Don't kill me" over and over again, his fear is palpable. As the heads of Iraq's kidnap victims are sawn off, Koranic recitations - usually by a well-known Saudi imam - are played on the soundtrack. At the beheading of an American, the murderer ritually wipes his bloody knife twice on the shirt of his victim, just as Saudi officials clean their blades after public executions in the kingdom. Terror by video is now a well-established part of the Iraq war.

'America is not a charitable organisation - they came to steal from Iraq'

21 July 2004

Outside on Sayed Ayatollah Ahmed Hassani al-Baghdadi's little lawn, the temperature is touching 60C. But inside his spacious library with its shelves of leather-bound volumes of Islamic science and law, the political heat soars between 3,000 degrees and minus 20. The Shia marja [leading Shia scholars] are known for their outspokenness but Sayed Baghdadi more than speaks his mind. The Americans occupied Iraq as part of a Zionist project, he announces. They will not leave Iraq because they intend to steal Iraq's oil. The new US-appointed Iraqi government are "collaborators". And Sayed Baghdadi, remember, is a highly respected and very influential marja whose lectures draw students from all over Iraq.

'A better and safer place' (Full Story)

Tony Blair justifying the Iraq war in his response to the Butler report

20 July 2004

For mile after mile south of Baghdad yesterday, the story was the same: empty police posts, abandoned Iraqi army and police checkpoints and a litter of burnt-out American fuel tankers and rocket-smashed police vehicles down the main highway to Hillah and Najaf. It was Afghanistan Mk2.

Four missiles, 14 deaths and the crisis of information in Baghdad (Full Story)

19 July 2004

This is how they like it. An American helicopter fires four missiles at a house in Fallujah. Fourteen people are killed, including women and children. Or so say the hospital authorities.

Six die in blast targeted at Iraqi minister (Full Story)

18 July 2004

How did they know he was coming? Even the Justice Minister's bodyguards - those who survived the suicide bomber - agreed they had never taken this route before. Old Malik Dohan al-Hassan - for the minister is 80 years old - had left his home in the Hay al-Jamiaa district of Baghdad just after 8.30am yesterday and his convoy of guards had just turned beneath a motorway bridge when they saw a small car being parked on the other side of the road.

Why Iraq's booksellers want the freedom to censor their shelves (Full Story)

17 July 2004

In Al-Mutanabi Street, the bookseller of Baghdad knows all. He can even explain why Saddam Hussein's bodice-ripper, Zabiba and the King, has sold out yet again. Nabil Hayawi sold 1,500 copies - a real Iraqi bestseller - and is waiting for the third edition of Saddam's tome to be printed in Beirut.

Coffin bomb ends another macabre day in 'new' Iraq (Full Story)

16 July 2004

A few hours before Lord Butler of Brockwell was attesting to the "good faith" of Tony Blair over the invasion of Iraq, Sabr Karim paid the price for working for "new Iraq".

Bloodshed in Baghdad as insurgents try to isolate government (Full Story)

15 July 2004

Lord Butler told us yesterday that Tony Blair acted in good faith. So that's all right then. At the al-Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad yesterday morning, there was blood on the walls, blood on the floor, blood on the doctors, blood on the stretchers. In the dangerous oven of Baghdad, 10 more lives had just ended. So what was it Tony Blair said in the Commons yesterday afternoon? "We are not killing civilians in Iraq; terrorists are killing civilians in Iraq." So that's all right then. Question: Are Baghdad and London on the same planet?

Academics targeted as murder and mayhem hits Iraqi colleges (Full Story)

14 July 2004

The Mongols stained the Tigris black with the ink of the Iraqi books they destroyed. Today's Mongols prefer to destroy the Iraqi teachers of books. Since the Anglo-American invasion, they have murdered at least 13 academics at the University of Baghdad alone and countless others across Iraq. History professors, deans of college and Arabic tutors have all fallen victim to the war on learning. Only six weeks ago - virtually unreported, of course - the female dean of the college of law in Mosul was beheaded in her bed, along with her husband.

Defaced by Americans, restored by Iraqis: Saddam's greatest folly (Full Story)

13 July 2004

They are going to preserve the monument to Saddam's greatest folly and his greatest war crime. The vast blue, egg-shell monument to his invasion of Iran and the subsequent eight-year war - complete with the names of about 600,000 Iraqi soldiers who were killed - is to be restored by the new, American-appointed Iraqi ministry of culture. Iraqi police now guard the site, only days after US troops abandoned the memorial. It had been used as an American military headquarters for well over a year.

Lessons for Bush from the grandson of a rebel against British rule in the 1920s (Full Story)

12 July 2004

The Americans could learn a lot from Sheikh Jouwad Mehdi al-Khalasi. A tall, distinguished man who speaks with both eloquence and humour, he has the same forehead and piercing eyes of his grandfather - the man who led the Shia Muslim insurrection against British occupation in 1920.

The day Jawad saw the birds fall from the sky and the villagers lying dead at his feet (Full Story)

10 July 2004

Jawad's job yesterday was to find The Independent a new fir tree - or at least some foliage which would colour the sun-bleached balcony of the paper's office in Baghdad. The fine little Christmas fir which graced the apartment had, despite promises of constant watering by colleagues, turned into a black, carbonised tree of tiny dark prickles. So it was that I set forth for the market garden behind Palestine Street, a place that reeks of hot flowers and undergrowth and pot plants and which is ruled over by Jawad, a 44-year-old with a sharp scar on his forehead but who knows he lives in jnah - Arabic for heaven.

So much for democracy: Iraqis plan for introduction of martial law (Full Story)

08 July 2004

Seventeen months after the Anglo-American invasion in which President George Bush promised to bring democracy to Iraq, the country's American-approved Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, yesterday introduced legislation allowing the Iraqi authorities to impose martial law, curfews, a ban on demonstrations, the restriction of movement, phone-tapping, the opening of mail and the freezing of bank accounts.

Tales from the Tigris riverbank (Full Story)

08 July 2004

Saleh Mohamed Fawzi is a ferryman and his life story is the story of Iraq. He talks to Robert Fisk as they journey through Baghdad

Across the lettuce-green waters of the Tigris river, we drifted yesterday, past Saddam Hussein's old school, past the 13th-century Mustansariya University, past the bomb-smashed wreckage of the ministry of defence. Saleh Mohamed Fawzi had turned off the boat's engine as we slid side-on beneath a great, old British railway bridge. "I can tell you everything about Saddam because he grew up just over there," Saleh said, and pointed a long, dark arm towards the steaming streets of al-Khurkh. The playground of Saddam's school backed on to the river, a wall of yellow concrete topped by a set of cheap football nets.

So this is what they call the new, 'free' Iraq (Full Story)

Americans hold Saddam Hussein. Americans ran the court in which he appeared. Americans censored the tapes of the hearing. Who do you think is running the country? Robert Fisk in Baghdad reports on Iraq's first week of freedom from coalition rule

04 July 2004

In his last hours as US proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer decided to tighten up some of the laws that his occupation authority had placed across the land of Iraq.

US military tried to censor coverage of Saddam hearing (Full Story)

03 July 2004

A team of US military officers acted as censors over all coverage of the hearings of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen on Thursday, destroying videotape of Saddam in chains and deleting the entire recorded legal submissions of 11 senior members of his former regime.

Confused? Shadow of his old self? Hardly  (Full Story)

02 July 2004

Bags beneath his eyes, beard greying, finger-jabbing with anger, Saddam was still the same fox, alert, cynical, defiant, abusive, proud. Yet history must record that the new "independent" government in Baghdad yesterday gave Saddam Hussein an initial trial hearing that was worthy of the brutal old dictator.

No mention of power cuts and violence at trial of the century (Full Story)

01 July 2004

Now it is time for bread and circuses. Keep the people distracted. Show them Saddam. Remind them what it used to be like. Make them grateful. Make Saddam pay. Show his face once more across the world so that his victims will think about the past, not the present. Charge him. Before the full majesty of Iraq's new "democratic" law. And may George Bush win the next American election.

The Handover: Restoration of Iraqi sovereignty - or Alice in Wonderland?  (Full Story)

29 June 2004

So in the end, America's enemies set the date. The handover of "full sovereignty" was secretly brought forward so that the ex-CIA intelligence officer who is now "Prime Minister" of Iraq could avoid another bloody offensive by America's enemies. What is supposed to be the most important date in Iraq's modern history was changed--like a birthday party--because it might rain on Wednesday.

Iraq, 1917 (Full Story)

17 June 2004

They came as liberators but were met by fierce resistance outside Baghdad. Humiliating treatment of prisoners and heavy-handed action in Najaf and Fallujah further alienated the local population. A planned handover of power proved unworkable. Britain's 1917 occupation of Iraq holds uncanny parallels with today - and if we want to know what will happen there next, we need only turn to our history books...

On the eve of our "handover" of "full sovereignty" to Iraq, this is a story of tragedy and folly and of dark foreboding. It is about the past-made-present, and our ability to copy blindly and to the very letter the lies and follies of our ancestors. It is about that admonition of antiquity: that if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. For Iraq 1917, read Iraq 2003. For Iraq 1920, read Iraq 2004 or 2005.

The things Bush didn't mention in his speech (Full Story)

The re-writing of Iraqi history is now going on at supersonic speed

26 May 2004

I can't wait to see Abu Ghraib prison reduced to rubble by the Americans - at the request of the new Iraqi government, of course. It will be turned to dust in order to destroy a symbol of Saddam's brutality. That's what President Bush tells us. So the re-writing of history still goes on.

If we see our enemies as inhuman, then we ourselves end up as savages (Full Story)

The present-day equivalent of the soldier in my father's book is Hollywood, with its poisonous, racist portrayal of Arabs and Muslims

08 May 2004

Less than six month before the outbreak of the First World War, my grandmother, Margaret Fisk, gave my father William a 360-page book of imperial adventure, Tom Graham VC, A Story of the Afghan War. "Presented to Willie by his Mother," she wrote in thick pencil inside the front cover. "Willie" would have been almost 15 years old.

An illegal and immoral war, betrayed by images that reveal our racism (Full Story)

07 May 2004

First, our enemies created the suicide bomber. Now, we have our own digital suicide bomber, the camera. Just look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi. Take a close look at the leather strap, the pain on the prisoner's face. No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In September 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash.

Pictures of wounded men being shot censored by TV (Full Story)

06 May 2004

The pictures are appalling, the words devastating. As a wounded Iraqi crawls from beneath a burning truck, an American helicopter pilot tells his commander that one of three men has survived his night air attack. "Someone wounded,'' the pilot cries. Then he received the reply: "Hit him, hit the truck and him.'' As the helicopter's gun camera captures the scene on video, the pilot fires a 30mm gun at the wounded man, vaporising him in a second.

The 'good guys' who can do no wrong (Full Story)

02 May 2004

Why are we surprised at their racism, their brutality, their sheer callousness towards Arabs? Those American soldiers in Saddam's old prison at Abu Ghraib, those young British squaddies in Basra came - as soldiers often come - from towns and cities where race hatred has a home: Tennessee and Lancashire.

A warning to those who dare to criticise Israel in the land of free speech (Full Story)

Mary Robinson suggested - horror of horrors - that the 'root cause of Arab-Israeli conflict is the occupation'

24 April 2004

Behold Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, would-be graduation commencement speaker at Emory University in the United States. She has made a big mistake. She dared to criticise Israel. She suggested - horror of horrors - that "the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the occupation". Now whoah there a moment, Mary! "Occupation"? Isn't that a little bit anti-Israeli?

By endorsing Ariel Sharon's plan George Bush has legitimised terrorism  (Full Story)

What better recruiting sergeant could Bin Laden have than the President of the United States?

16 April 2004

So President George Bush tears up the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan and that's okay. Israeli settlements for Jews and Jews only on the West Bank. That's okay. Taking land from Palestinians who have owned that land for generations, that's okay. UN Security Council Resolution 242 says that land cannot be acquired by war. Forget it. That's okay.

Deaths of scores of mercenaries not reported  (Full Story)

13 April 2004

At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq.

The planners of the war in Iraq have just one answer to their critics: 'shut up'

Thanks to the subservience of many members of the press, the US administration has had an easy time

10 April 2004

Just shut up. That's the new foreign policy line of our masters. When Senator Edward Kennedy dubbed Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam", US Secretary of State Colin Powell told him to be "a little more restrained and careful" in his comments. I recall that when the US commenced its bombing of Afghanistan, the White House spokesman claimed that some journalists were "asking questions that the American people wouldn't want asked". Back in the early 1980s, when I reported on the Iranian soldiers on a troop train to Tehran who were coughing Saddam's mustard gas out of their lungs in blood and mucus, a Foreign Office official told my then editor on The Times that my dispatch was "not helpful". In other words, stop criticising our ally, Saddam.

A war that was founded on lies and illusions has one simple truth: Iraqis do not want us (Full Story)

09 April 2004

A war founded on illusions, lies and right-wing ideology was bound to founder in blood and fire. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He was in contact with al-Qa'ida, he was involved with the crimes against humanity of 11 September. The people of Iraq would greet us with flowers and music. There would be a democracy.

A PoW's exit: US airlifts Saddam out of Iraq (Full Story)

07 April 2004

The United States has secretly flown Saddam Hussein out of Iraq and imprisoned him under high security at a vast American air base in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar.

Iraq on the brink of anarchy  (Full Story)

06 April 2004

Not content with surrounding the largest Sunni city west of Baghdad with tanks, armoured personnel carriers and heavy machine-guns, US forces used Apache helicopters to attack the Shia Muslim slums of Shoula yesterday, sent dozens of their heavy battle tanks into the hovels of Sadr City and then slapped an arrest warrant on the Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr - who must dearly have wanted the United States to do just that.

A bloody day in Iraq: Eight US troops die as battles erupt (Full Story)

05 April 2004

To the horror of the occupying powers in Iraq, the country's ever more bloody insurgency spilt into the majority Shia Muslim community yesterday with seven US soldiers killed in clashes in Baghdad and another dying in the holy city of Najaf, with the loss of at least 22 lives, most of them Iraqis.

Dust off the flak jacket. Lay low. And stay off the streets...

At the end of his latest tour, our correspondent reflects on a horrific week in the nation and looks ahead to 30 June

04 April 2004

What would happen if the Americans left tomorrow? This has become the latest buzz-question in the US media. Civil war. Chaos. Anarchy. So we cannot leave. We have to protect the Iraqi people. Ergo, the Iraqi people don't want us to leave. We are protecting them from civil war. We are saving them from themselves. The problem is that many Iraqis would prefer to have the responsibility to look after themselves without our presence.

Three more families now rage against the American occupation of their land

Because I almost lost my own life in December 2001 I take a special interest in journalists - and their fate

03 April 2004

Yesterday morning, I sat down in a Baghdad home with a poor old man and his daughter who were mourning their adored son and brother who was killed by American soldiers. Now, you may ask why I do not write about Fallujah and the atrocities which occurred there three days ago: the cruel and atrocious murder of four Americans who were hauled, begging for their lives, from their two sports utility vehicles, burned, mutilated, dragged through the streets and then hanged naked - what was left of their bodies - from a decaying British railway bridge over the Euphrates river. The answer is simple. US proconsul Paul Bremer called their deaths "barbaric and inexcusable". Paul Bremer was right. But their deaths were not inexplicable.

Atrocity in Fallujah (Full Story)

01 April 2004

"The bodies were hanging upside down on each side of the bridge. They had no hands, no feet, one had no head." My old Iraqi friend had been driving into Fallujah just after the massacre, the stoning, the burning. He was shaking as he told me what he saw. "They were hanging upside down above the highway, on the old railway bridge which bridge, now a road bridge. The people of Fallujah were just driving over the bridge as if nothing was happening, right past the bodies." The bridge is on the west side of the Sunni Muslim city, across the Euphrates river, and the corpses had been tied to the girders about six feet above the road. "When we left, there were no helicopters, no police, no soldiers, it all seemed quite normal; except for the bodies. They were burnt brown. I couldn't tell if they were men or women."

Things are getting much worse. It's not just a 'spike' or an 'uptick' in violence (Full Story)

01 April 2004

What has happened to the Coalition Provisional Authority, also known as the occupying power?  Things are getting worse, much worse in Iraq. Yesterday's horrors proved that. Yet just a day earlier, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, America's deputy director of military operations, assured us that there was only an "uptick" in violence in Iraq.

Bremer closes hardline newspaper and Iraqis ask: Is this democracy US-style? (Full Story)

30 March 2004

Another little lesson in democracy. "The Americans and the Governing Council are kaffirs," the Iraqi Shias screamed yesterday from the minibus in Al-Hurriyah Square. Hurriyah means freedom. Kaffirs means infidels, atheists, apostates.  Click Here for Full Story

Black flags and veils as religion returns to campuses of Iraq (Full Story)

29 March 2004

The black flags of Muharram are draped over the front of the School of Arts, banners of mourning erected by Shias at the vast campus of the University of Baghdad. The words praise Imam Hussein's revolution in the seventh century against the Omayads and they seek to draw all students - Christian as well as Sunni - into their tears of martyrdom.

Britain's secret army in Iraq: thousands of armed security men who answer to nobody (Full Story)

28 March 2004

So many British security firms are cashing in on the violence in Iraq that armed private security men now outnumber most of the national army contingents in the country.

Occupiers spend millions on private army of security men (Full Story)

28 March 2004

An army of thousands of mercenaries has appeared in Iraq's major cities, many of them former British and American soldiers hired by the occupying Anglo-American authorities and by dozens of companies who fear for the lives of their employees.

Sunni and Shia share grief at doctor's murder  Full Story

27 March 2004

Over the suburban Baghdad street in which Dr Hazem al-Ani lived and died hangs a black cotton banner.

Slaughter of Iraqi 'collaborators' undermines US sovereignty hopes  (Full Story)

26 March 2004

What will happen on 30 June? Every day now, the gunmen attack the Iraqis who work for Westerners, for the occupation powers, for the reconstruction companies, for journalists.

Welcome to Gaddafi's mad, mad world  (Full Story)

What amazes me is Blair's choice of fall-guy: one of the weirdest, battiest, deadliest Arab dictators of them all

25 March 2004

We live, as the Arabs say, in interesting times. Today, our Prime Minister flies to Libya to pay homage at the court of Gaddafi. The man blamed for blasting two airliners - one American, one French - out of the sky, for sending weapons to the IRA, for invading Chad, killing a young British policewoman, murdering political opponents at home and abroad, who has himself been bombed by both the United States and Egypt, is to play host to our dear Prime Minister. Gaddafi of the Green Book meets Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara. I cannot wait.

The day the 1st Armoured Division, with guns at the ready, came to check on our man in Baghdad (Full Story)

24 March 2004

I was standing on my balcony in the darkness, puffing on a fine Havana - I had just filed my day's report to The Independent's foreign desk - when I saw the soldiers of the 1st Armoured Division padding down the road outside.

Finnish civilians join list of fatalities as 14 British soldiers hurt in Basra  (Full Story)

23 March 2004

Yesterday, two Finnish businessmen were professionally assassinated in a Baghdad underpass, citizens of a neutral country which opposed last year's invasion of Iraq.

The chilling implications of this state killing (Full story)

23 March 2004

It doesn't take an awful lot of courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair. But it takes only a few moments to absorb the implications of the assassination of Sheikh Yassin. Yes, he endorsed suicide bombings - including the murder of Israeli children. Yes, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword, in a wheelchair or not. But something went wrong with the narrative of the news story yesterday - and something infinitely more dangerous, another sinister precedent - was set for our brave new world.

The man who knew too much  (Full Story)

He was drugged, kidnapped and locked up for 18 years after revealing Israel's nuclear secrets to the world. Next month Mordechai Vanunu is finally set to be released, but just how much freedom will he be allowed? Robert Fisk reports

23 March 2004

Any Israeli who bought the 16 February edition of the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth would have believed that a truly wicked man was about to be released from Ashkelon prison. Each time a suicide bomber blew himself up, the prisoner would celebrate. Worse still, said the paper, the inmate - once a keeper of Israel's nuclear secrets - wants to endanger his country further after his release. "He told me," a former prisoner was quoted as saying, "that he has additional material and that he will reveal secrets..."

New Iraq? Hooded protest and masked statistics  (Full Story)

20 March 2004

Exactly a year after the Anglo-American armies invaded Iraq, I found five young men yesterday busy smashing up what was left of a Saddam statue in this little dusty border village. The torso and head of the dictator had long disappeared from his plinth at the frontier station but his legs and one arm and a battery of monumental missiles still lay on the ground in gleaming steel. Two American attack helicopters were racing up the border - still trying to find Donald Rumsfeld's al-Qa'ida hordes as they supposedly swarm into Iraq - but what caught my eye were the heads of the five young men, so assiduously hammering and sawing and hacking at the remains of the statue. Four of them were wearing black face masks, the fifth had a black hood over his head. A year after the fall of Saddam, Iraqis have to hide their identity when they attack his image. What does that tell us about "new Iraq"?

'If I am told to go, I will go.' Spanish soldiers prepare to return to home front (Full Story)

18 March 2004

Ask the three Spanish soldiers atop their troop transporter if they want to stay or go home, and they roar with laughter amid the Iraqi traffic jam. 

Car bomb attack on Baghdad hotel leaves 17 dead

18 March 2004

Scenes from hell come every day in Iraq, but last night's car bomb cut down the innocent with savage abandon.

Al-Qa'ida attacks intensify, but Iraqi police say: 'Let them come'

17 March 2004

The sun blazes down on the protective wall of concrete drums­ hundreds upon hundreds of them ­ and Major Saad stands in the car park of the Amariyah police organised crime unit with a story he wants to tell. Behind him is the shell of a suicide bomber's car. 

Iraq: a year of war

The invasion of Iraq would, we were told, rid the world of mortal danger. One year on, the only people who feel safer are those who prefer not to think for themselves
17 March 2004

The impact of the cruise missiles can still be seen in the telecommunications tower across the Tigris. The Ministry of Defence still lies in ruins. Half the government ministries in Baghdad are still fire-stained, a necessary reminder of the cancer of arson that took hold of the people of this city in the first hours and days of their "liberation".

The West was warned. Now it is paying the price of the 'war on terror' (Full Story)

15 March 2004

They had been warned. The Aznars and the Blairs and the Bushes had been told by those who were their allies - France and Germany and many others, not to mention the Arabs - that their crusade against al-Qa'ida could most cruelly rebound upon them. The Madrid bombings are not only a terrible revenge for Spain's participation in "part two" of the "war on terror" - the illegal invasion of Iraq - but a cruel and incrementally more painful attack on civilians by al-Qa'ida.

Happy first birthday, war on Iraq (Full Story)

14 March 2004

It was almost year ago, on March 20, when the first bombs struck 30km from Baghdad, orange glows that wallowed along the horizon. They came for Baghdad the next day, and the Cruise missiles swished over our heads to explode around the presidential palace compound, the very pile where Paul Bremer, America's supposed "expert" on terrorism, now works, resides and hides as occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American Raj.

Focus: One year on - war without end

14 March 2004

Saddam may be gone but peace has not come. Robert Fisk was in Baghdad when the tyrant was in his pomp and when the first bombs fell on 19 March 2003. His acclaimed reports revealed the suffering of the Iraqi people. Now, as the anniversary of the war approaches, he returns to a land riven by chaos, where liberation is a myth

The surviving Iraqi employees of the United Nations fearfully changed the plates on their white, unmarked vehicles last week. From now on, there will be no "UN" next to the registration number. When I visited the headquarters of the Muslim Red Crescent society to talk to the lone representative of the Red Cross, the man at the desk fingered my business card and looked into my eyes with palpable fear - as if an Englishman was a potential suicide bomber.

Iraqi civilians targeted for 'collaborating' with the US

12 March 2004

On the long highways out of Baghdad - on the notorious Highway 8 to Hilla and further south - a dark and fearful tactic is being resurrected from the terrible years of Algerian butchery just a decade ago: the false police checkpoint.

The life and unexplained death of a Palestinian militant (Full Story)

11 March 2004

Mohamed Aboul Abbas, the 'Achille Lauro' planner, said he never intended passengers to be held hostage or anyone to be killed, and apologised for it. The US and Israel allowed him back to Gaza. So why was he in a US prison in Iraq?

When 55-year-old Mohamed Aboul Abbas died mysteriously in a US prison camp in Iraq on Tuesday, nobody bothered to call his family. His American captors had given no indication to the International Red Cross that he had been unwell and his wife Reem first heard that he was dead when she watched an Arab television news show.

Iraqi recruits put in the firing line while Americans retreat to safety of barracks (Full Story)

10 March 2004

A drive to the former Saddam Hussein International Airport to meet a colleague. Palm trees cut down on the airport road by the Americans to deprive snipers of cover, the wood given free of charge to Iraqis who sell it in turn to bakeries in Baghdad.

Iraq constitution sealed at last, and immediately come the warnings of an upsurge in violence (Full Story)

09 March 2004

They used King Faisal's old table to sign the document, the desk upon which Winston Churchill's choice as monarch once tried, not very successfully, to rule Iraq. It was, of course, supposed to be a special day in Iraqi history. Twenty-five local leaders - most television reports spared viewers that uncomfortable and all-important qualification "American-appointed' - dutifully signed their new and temporary constitution.

'It's the same old Iraq, just a tiny bit worse than it was last month' (Full Story)

08 March 2004

Each time I return to Iraq, it's the same, like finding a razor blade in a bar of chocolate. The moment you start to believe that "New Iraq" might work - just - you get the proof that it's the same old Iraq, just a little tiny bit worse than it was last month.  

Insurers pay out 90 years after the 20th century's first genocide

07 March 2004

Almost 90 years after the 20th century's first genocide - the mass slaughter of one and a half million Armenians by Turkey during the First World War - descendants of the victims are at last to receive compensation from American companies with whom their murdered families once insured their lives.

All this talk of civil war, and now this carnage. Coincidence? (Full Story)

03 March 2004

Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war in Iraq. I have never heard a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq. Al-Qa'ida has never uttered a threat against Shias - even though al-Qa'ida is a Sunni-only organisation. Yet for weeks, the American occupation authorities have been warning us about civil war, have even produced a letter said to have been written by an al-Qa'ida operative, advocating a Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally sane journalists have enthusiastically taken up this theme. Civil war.

Beirut has moved on but the scars of war remain (Full Story)

17 February 2004

The door upon which Terry Waite knocked after returning from his first meeting with the kidnappers of Beirut still makes the same heavy booming sound it did more than 15 years ago.

British soldiers face new charges of Iraq brutality (Full Story)

15 February 2004

British soldiers called hooded Iraqi detainees by footballers' names as they kicked and beat them, The Independent on Sunday has been told. One of the Iraqis subsequently died. Kifah Taha, a hotel worker who suffered acute renal failure after being kicked by soldiers during questioning, said each of the Iraqis was given a nickname. "They called us by the names of footballers," he said, "and kept telling us to repeat them, so we would remember who we were."

Did British soldiers lose all control and decency at the notorious Camp Bucca? (Full Story)

15 February 2004

Photographs brought home from Iraq by a British soldier caused a scandal last year when he took them to be developed. One showed a prisoner of war, gagged and bound in netting, dangling from a forklift truck driven by a soldier. Others depicted squaddies performing sex acts close to Iraqi PoWs.

The fantasy of democracy in an Arab state (Full Story)

Arab states are largely squalid, corrupt, brutal dictatorships. No surprise there. We created most of these dictators

13 February 2004

For democracy, read fantasy. Iraq is getting so nasty for our great leaders these days that anything - and anyone - is going to be thrown to the dogs to save them. The BBC, the CIA, British intelligence - any journalist that dares to point out the lies that led us to war - get pelted with more lies. The moment we suggest that Iraq never was fertile soil for Western democracy, we get accused of being racists. Do we think the Arabs are incapable of producing democracy, we are asked? Do we think they are subhuman?

America sets its sights on a new Public Enemy No 1

12 February 2004

As Iraq reeled beneath savage and almost daily suicide bombings, US forces yesterday doubled the reward - from $5 million to $10 million - for the capture of Musab Zarqawi, an obscure and little-known associate of Osama bin Laden whom they claim is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq.

Saudis blame God's will as 300 pilgrims crushed to death at Haj  (Full Story)

02 February 2004

Yet another tragedy befell the Islamic haj pilgrimage yesterday when up to 300 pilgrims were crushed and trampled to death while stoning the three pillars at Mina which millions of Muslims regard as the impersonation of Satan.

Lebanon swaps its war dead for 'Mossad man'

31 January 2004

If they had been fêted in life as they were in death, how many of the young men freighted across the border from Israel yesterday might still be alive? They came - all 59 of them, Hizbollah guerrillas for the most part - in pine coffins, escorted by the International Red Cross, fresh from their shallow graves in the secret cemetery which Israel maintains for its enemy dead at Gesher B'Not Ya'acov in Galilee.

Why Israel will do business in the hostage bazaar

30 January 2004

The man in the turban was called the "Voice of Faith" by his Hizbollah supporters and he could never have guessed - emerging yesterday in his white turban and brown robe from the German aircraft that brought him to freedom at Beirut airport - that a mere prelate from the scruffy village of Jibchit could earn such an official reception from the highest men of state in Lebanon.

Revealed: The women who suffered Saddam's tyranny  (Full Story)

23 January 2004

The women's faces are all veiled. They are mostly young. They are all Iraqi Shia Muslims. And their terrible fate - their vicious torture and deliberately cruel executions - should place their deaths on the list of barbarities for which Saddam Hussein could be tried, although almost all were put to death when the United States was supporting Saddam's regime.

How the 19 billion 'dirty dinars' were quickly cleaned up (Full Story)

21 January 2004

When a private Lebanese jet arrived at Beirut International Airport packed with 19 billion new Iraqi dinars in banknotes (about £6.5m), the authorities immediately impounded the aircraft and arrested the three men aboard. It was a coup that seemed likely to earn the favour of the US, which has, for years, been threatening Lebanon with financial sanctions if it allows dirty money to cross its frontiers.

Shot for a Mercedes and left to die: the highway 'Ali Babas' claim another victim  (Full Story)

07 January 2004

Maybe my driver had a premonition. All the way back from Basra, he was nervous, anxious not to stop at villages - even petrol stations - for fear of thieves.

In the marshes, Iraqis still find dead soldiers from old wars (Full Story)

06 January 2004

We were back in Marsh Arab country yesterday, Haidar and I, scouring the country west of the infamous Hawr al-Hawizah marshes where Saddam first used gas against his Iranian enemies.

A birdsong that proves water is bringing Marsh Arabs' world back to life  (Full Story)

05 January 2004

Abbas Oweid stood next to what was left of Saddam's dam and swept his hand across the grey desolation of sand, dust and broken homes to the north. "I knew all these villages" he said. "Take this down in your notebook; you should remember the names of these dead villages: Mahamar, Manzan, Meshal, Daoudi, Djezeran Nakbia, Zalal, Abu Talfa, Jdedah, Ghalivah, Um al-Hamadi, Al-Gufas, Al-Khor, Al-Hammsn ..."

'The British said my son would be free soon. Three days later I had his body' (Full Story)

Robert Fisk reports from Basra on the 'death in custody' of the son of an Iraqi police colonel and evidence that he was savagely and deliberately beaten to death by British soldiers

04 January 2004

The last time Lieutenant Colonel Daoud Mousa of the Iraqi police saw his son Baha alive was on 14 September, as British soldiers raided the Basra hotel where the young man worked as a receptionist.

British soldiers 'kicked Iraqi prisoner to death' (Full Story)

04 January 2004

Eight young Iraqis arrested in Basra were kicked and assaulted by British soldiers, one of them so badly that he died in British custody, according to military and medical records seen by The Independent on Sunday.

Far from Baghdad, soldiers and pilgrims shake hands (Full Story)

03 January 2004

Most of Iraq is peaceful, they keep telling you at afternoon follies. An abiding theme of the occupation authorities - even when another American helicopter is shot down - is that life is normal in most of Iraq.

A cruel sense of humour is all that is left for Iraqis to cling to after a suicide bombing (Full Story)

02 January 2004

Mystification. why would a bomber blow himself up to destroy a restaurant? There's no doubt that the man who killed eight diners in Nabil's on Wednesday was a suicide attacker.

Mr Bush has one priority for 2004: Get America out of Iraq. Fast. (Full Story)

Iraq is breaking up into rebels and collaborators, with a vast heap of innocent bodies turning up each day at the morgues

02 January 2004

Ever since Daniel Pipes - he of the failed American neo-cons - piped up last summer with his plan to install a "democratic-minded autocrat" (sic) in Iraq, I have been eyeing the Washington crystal ball for further signs of what the designers of this wretched war have in store for the Iraqis whom they "liberated" for "democracy" last year. And bingo, not long before Christmas, another of those chilling proposals for "New Iraq" popped up from the same right-wing cabal. Any predictions for Iraq this year may thus have to be based on the thoughts of Leslie Gelb, a former chairman of the United States Council on Foreign Relations, whose wretched plans for "liberated" Iraq call for something close to ethnic cleansing.

War takes an inhuman twist with cats, dogs and donkeys turned into bombs (Full Story)

01 January 2004

"Watch out for the donkey!" we cried yesterday near the town hall. I like donkeys. The Arabs despise the hamar but I have always loved the grey-haired wisdom of the beast, those big, affectionate eyes, its soft fur and slavish love. Poor old "donks", we said sadly when the insurgents used donkey carts to fire rockets at the Palestine and Sheraton hotels in Baghdad. One of the animals - badly singed on its rear by a missile - upset the rest of the armoury on to the road and may have saved lives. But when a donkey came clopping up to an American checkpoint on Tuesday, all animal love was set aside.

Web lets Palestinian children find world beyond refugee camp (Full Story)

31 December 2003

There are 32 children in the class, all Palestinian, all new experts on the internet. Qassem Sa'ad, a small man with a neat brown moustache, is proud of them and not without reason. Noisy they may be, but enthusiastic they obviously are. And bright.

The occupiers, as ever, are damned either way - especially when the innocent die (Full Story)

31 December 2003

Cigarette sellers don't have names. They said he was called Fouad but even the shopkeeper whose nephew drove the wounded, screaming man to hospital didn't know his family name.

UK charity seeks compensation over 'lost' cancer drugs for Iraqi children (Full Story)

30 December 2003

A British charity for Iraqi children is demanding that the Government repay almost £100,000 to its donors after nearly half its shipment of medicines ­ including vital cancer drugs ­ was lost by the British Army after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

Checkpoints prove useless against suicide bombers in Iraqi holy city (Full Story)

29 December 2003

A severed arm with a hand still attached to it lay a few metres from the broken gates of the mayor's office in Karbala yesterday, a piece of humanity every bit as bloody as the story of the seventh-century Shia martyr Hussein, the golden dome of whose shrine could be seen through the smog to the east.

At least 13 die in Iraq suicide bombings (Full Story)

28 December 2003

In a carefully planned attack that was clearly intended to take the lives of dozens of occupation troops, Iraqi insurgents yesterday assaulted Polish-led forces in the holy Shia Muslim city of Karbala. At least six foreign soldiers - four Bulgarians and two Thais - as well as seven Iraqis were killed, and nearly 40 were wounded.

Hooded men executing Saddam officials (Full Story)

28 December 2003

General Charles de Gaulle gave the French resistance 48 hours to régler les comptes - settle accounts - after the liberation of France. But after the "liberation" of Iraq, the Baath party's enemies have declared it open season to hunt down and murder hundreds of the former regime's officials - with not the slightest attempt by the Anglo-American armies or their newly installed police force to end the bloodshed.

From joy to despair: Iraqis pay for Saddam's capture (Full Story)

27 December 2003

Ali Salman Ali was the first victim of Saddam's capture, but he died on Christmas Day. As his father Salman Ghazi, 71, tells it, Ali must have been among the first of Iraq's Shia Muslims to scream his delight in the street after the former dictator emerged from his hole in the ground.

Deaths mount on both sides on Christmas Day in Iraq (Full Story)

26 December 2003

How the artillery thundered. How the jets roared. How the machine-gun fire vibrated in the night. If the Americans were playing Santa to children on the streets of Baghdad yesterday, they were playing "Operation Iron Hammer" much more seriously.

Iraq through the American looking glass (Full Story)

Insurgents are civilians. Tanks that crush civilians are traffic accidents. And civilians should endure heavy doses of fear and violence

26 December 2003

Something very unpleasant is being let loose in Iraq. Just this week, a company commander in the US 1st Infantry Division in the north of the country admitted that, in order to elicit information about the guerrillas who are killing American troops, it was necessary to "instill fear" in the local villagers. An Iraqi interpreter working for the Americans had just taken an old lady from her home to frighten her daughters and grand-daughters into believing that she was being arrested.

A glimpse of Old Iraq, age of Arab enlightenment, amid the bullets of 'democracy'

23 December 2003

Just beside Baghdad's cloth market are two noble wooden doors set in a massive and ancient brick wall with the first words of the Koran inscribed on the top. There is only one God but God and His Prophet is Mohamed. Because classical Arabic today remains the same language as that in which the Koran was written, there is always a slight surprise to see words written so long ago in unmistakably the same spelling and sense.

Straw reinvents despotic little killer Gaddafi as courageous statesman (Full story)

22 December 2003

The problem I have with the whole Gaddafi saga is that the Libya I know can scarcely repair a drain or install a working lavatory in a hotel.

Clerics plead with guerrillas to think of civilians as US counter-attacks take toll

21 December 2003

Another former Baath party official was murdered in Najaf yesterday, the five-year-old son of another was shot dead, and three policemen were mistakenly killed by American troops south of Kirkuk. Life after Saddam's capture is beginning to sound depressingly like life before the ex-dictator was seized by US forces a week ago.

In a Baghdad book market a man with hard eyes takes aim at Saddam's picture. His spittle lands on the dictator's nose

20 December 2003

You can't get rid of Saddam Hussein. The day starts with another bomb in the grey, clinging winter grime of Baghdad. An office that belongs to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq - an organisation that is neither supreme nor, it seems, really intent on revolution - has been blown up. There were four families living inside and one man has been killed.

Phantom insurgents pay a deadly price for Iraq's 'liberation' (Full Story)

19 December 2003

Schoolboy Issam Naim Hamid is the latest of America's famous "insurgents". In Samarra - for which read Fantasyville - he was shot in the back as he tried to protect himself with his parents in his home in the Al-Jeheriya district of the ancient Abbasid city.

Another bomb creates its obscene theatre in Baghdad (Full Story)

18 December 2003

The thump of air pressure on the window wakes me up, a blast of sound that gently shakes the walls; the sound of 17 lives disappearing. Bombs in Baghdad are a daily heartbeat, the aftermath a kind of obscene theatre.

Insurgents or protesters? 18 are killed in clashes with US troops (Full Story)

17 December 2003

While Washington and London were still congratulating themselves on the capture of Saddam Hussein, US troops have shot dead at least 18 Iraqis in the streets of three major cities in the country. Dramatic videotape from the city of Ramadi 75 miles west of Baghdad showed unarmed supporters of Saddam Hussein being gunned down in semi-darkness as they fled from Americans troops. Eleven of the 18 dead were killed by the Americans in Samarra to the north of Baghdad.

It's not hard for an Iraqi to become schizophrenic... it's a national disease (Full Story)

17 December 2003

Al-Adil is is as good a place as any in Baghdad to understand the meaning of occupation. And fear. And betrayal. It's a leafy little road, middle-class in an Iraqi way, educated families living in villas shadowed by palm trees. But when I drove past, the 82nd Airborne were paying a social call with two M1A1 Abrams tanks and six Humvees and a company of soldiers and - here was the rub - a group of armed and hooded men.

Luncheon-meat, poetry and skin cream: the cold comforts of Saddam's last hiding place  (Full Story)

16 December 2003

There was a kind of satisfaction, lying inside Saddam's last hole in the earth. Seven months ago, I sat on his red velvet presidential throne in the greatest of all his marble palaces. And so there I was yesterday, lowering myself into the damp, dark and grey concrete interior of his final retreat, the midget bunker buried beside the Tigris - all of eight feet by five - and as near to an underground prison as any of his victims might imagine.

This dictator will continue to haunt Iraq (Full Story)

16 December 2003

If only we could have got rid of this man 15 years ago, how warm would be our welcome in Iraq today

Was this really the man with whom I shook hands almost a quarter of a century ago? I've spent 24 hours looking again and again at those videotapes. The more I look, the more Saddam turns into a wild animal. An American interviewed by the Associated Press said he'd gone straight to church to pray for him. The face I remember from my meeting with him almost a quarter of a century ago was chubby in an insolent sort of way, the moustache so well trimmed that it looked as if it had been stuck on his face with paste, the huge double-breasted suit the kind that Nazi leaders used to wear, too empty, too floppy on the shoulders.

'The tyrant is now a prisoner' (Full Story)

13.12.2003 Saddam Hussein is captured by American troops near Tikrit

15 December 2003

So they got Saddam at last. Unkempt, his tired eyes betraying defeat; even the $750,000 in cash found in his hole in the ground demeaned him. Saddam in chains; maybe not literally, but he looked in that extraordinary videotape yesterday like a prisoner of ancient Rome, the barbarian at last cornered, the hand caressing the scraggy beard. All those ghosts - of gassed Iranians and Kurds, of Shias gunned into the mass graves of Karbala, of the prisoners dying under excruciating torture in the villas of Saddam's secret police - must surely have witnessed something of this.

Saddam's capture will not stop the relentless killings from insurgents (Full Story)

15 December 2003

"Peace" and "reconciliation" were the patois of Downing Street and the White House yesterday. But all those hopes of a collapse of resistance are doomed. Saddam was neither the spiritual nor the political guide to the insurgency that is now claiming so many lives in Iraq - far more Iraqi than Western lives, one might add - and, however happy Messrs Bush and Blair may be at the capture of Saddam, the war goes on.

US eyes up Saddam's Baghdad palace as site for embassy (Full Story)

14 December 2003

Saddam Hussein's massive presidential palace in Baghdad - with its imperial domes and marble columns and swimming pools - may soon be turned into America's new embassy in Iraq.

Bandits and bombs keep the new trains of Iraq waiting at the station (Full Story)

13 December 2003

"We had 20 passengers to Basra today; four carriages and one locomotive," Shakra Mahmoud announces. He is the stationmaster of Baghdad Central and he beams with satisfaction at a job well done. So what time did the Basra train leave, I ask Mr Mahmoud and his smile fades away.

Revealed: the first evidence of foreigners fighting in Iraq (Full Story)

Proof of insurgents from Lebanon emerges as thousands of charges are likely to be heard by court that will be set up within days

07 December 2003

When the Lebanese police arrested Moammer Abdullah Aouama last month, they claimed they had caught one of the men behind a series of bomb attacks against American fast-food restaurants in Lebanon.

The lies we tell to appease the enemies who are now our friends (Full Story)

Even now, the Japanese government will not acknowledge the crimes of rape and massacre committed in the last war

29 November 2003

When George Bush sneaked into Baghdad airport for his two-hour "warm meal" for Thanksgiving, he was in feisty form. Americans hadn't come to Baghdad "to retreat before a bunch of thugs and assassins". Evil is still around, it seems, ready to attack the forces of Good. And if only a handful of the insurgents in Iraq are ex-Baathists - and I suspect it is only a handful - then who would complain if Saddam's henchmen are called "thugs"? But Evil's a tricky thing. Here one day, gone the next. Take Japan.

Attacked for telling some home truths (Full Story)

Are we now to support atrocities against the 'scum of the earth' in our moral campaign against Evil?

26 November 2003

In Iraq, they are just numbers, bloodstains on a road. But in the little town of Madison in Wisconsin last week, they were all too real on the front page of the local paper, the Capital Times. Sergeant Warren Hansen, Specialist Eugene Uhl and Second Lieutenant Jeremy Wolfe of the 101st Airborne Division were all on their way home for the last time.

We are paying the price of an infantile attempt to reshape the Middle East  (Full Story)

The Australians paid the price for the alliance with Bush in Bali. The Italians paid the price in Nasiriyah. Now it is our turn

21 November 2003

It's the price of joining George Bush's "war on terror". They couldn't hit Britain while Bush was on his triumphalist state visit to London, so they went for the jugular in Turkey. The British consulate, the British-headquartered HSBC bank. London-abroad. And of course, no one - least of all the Turks - imagined they would strike twice in the same place. Turkey had already had its dose of attacks, hadn't it?

Why an Arab and a Jew fought Hitler, then each other, and died as friends (Full Story)

11 November 2003

No one remembers the Palestine Regiment. Even this morning, on the actual day of remembrance, few will recall that Arab and Jew once fought together under the British flag against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Even fewer will know the extraordinary story of an Arab and a Jew who fought side by side against Hitler, and then twice fought each other as enemy combatants - in 1948 and 1967 - and of how, in their declining years, they became friends. But in a Middle East in which "hawks" and "doves" and "terrorists" and "security forces" battle to the death, their story provides an extraordinary - and shaming - indictment of both Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat.

A growing insurrection against the Saudi royals  (Full Story)

10 November 2003

Osama Bin Laden has an awful lot of friends in Saudi Arabia. In the mosques, among the disenchanted youth, among the security forces, even ­ and this is what the West declines to discuss ­ within the royal family. Saudi ambassadors routinely dismiss these facts as "unfounded" but Saturday's devastating attack in the capital, Riyadh, is part of a growing insurrection against Bin Laden's enemies in the House of Saud.

In a bookshop in Lebanon, I find this evil anti-Semitic tract and remove it from the shelf  (Full Story)

08 November 2003

I was walking towards Sadat Street this week when my beaver eyes surveyed the window of a bookstore. And there in the window - how my heart sank - was an all too familiar title: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yet again.

How we denied democracy to the Middle East  (Full Story)

08 November 2003

We created this place, weaned the grotesque dictators. And we expect the Arabs to trust Bush's promise?

It gets weirder and weirder. As his helicopters are falling out of the sky over Iraq, President Bush tells us things are getting even better. The more we succeed, he says, the deadlier the attacks will become. Thank God the Americans now have a few - a very few - brave journalists, like Maureen Dowd, to explain what is happening.

Since when did 'Arab' become a dirty word?  (Full Story)

04 November 2003

In Australia they're even trying to prevent Hanan Ashrawi from receiving the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize

Is "Palestinian" now just a dirty word? Or is "Arab" the dirty word? Let's start with the late Edward Said, the brilliant and passionate Palestinian-American academic who wrote - among many other books - Orientalism, the ground-breaking work which first explored our imperial Western fantasies about the Middle East. After he died of leukaemia last month, Zev Chafets sneered at him in the New York Daily News in the following words: "As an Episcopalian, he's ineligible for the customary 72 virgins, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's honoured with a couple of female doctoral graduates."

Iraq's guerrillas adopt new strategy: copy the Americans  (Full Story)

28 October 2003

Understanding the brain. That's what you have to do in a guerrilla war. Find out how it works, what it's trying to do. An attack on US headquarters in Baghdad and six suicide bombings, all at the start of Ramadan. Thirty-four dead and 200 wounded. Where have I heard those statistics before? And how could they be so well co-ordinated - well-timed, down to the last second? And why the Red Cross? I knew that building, and admired the way in which the International Red Cross refused to associate themselves with the American occupation - even at the cost of their lives, as the guards outside their Baghdad headquarters carried no guns.

Eye witness: 'They're getting better,' Chuck said approvingly. 'That one hit the runway' (Full Story)

Running the gauntlet of small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades after check-in at Baghdad airport

26 October 2003

You need to take a military escort to reach Baghdad airport these days. Yes, things are getting better in Iraq, according to President Bush - remember that each hour that goes by - but the guerrillas are getting so close to the runways that the Americans have chopped down every tree, every palm bush, every scrap of undergrowth on the way. Rocket-propelled grenades have killed so many GIs on this stretch of highway that the US army - like the Israelis in southern Lebanon in the mid-80s - have erased nature. You travel to Baghdad airport through a wasteland. Heathrow it isn't.

One, two, three, what are they fighting for?  (Full Story)

The worst problem facing US forces in Iraq may not be armed resistance but a crisis of morale. Robert Fisk reports on a near-epidemic of indiscipline, suicides and loose talk.

24 October 2003

I WAS in the police station in the town of Fallujah when I realised the extent of the schizophrenia. Captain Christopher Cirino of the 82nd Airborne was trying to explain to me the nature of the attacks so regularly carried out against American forces in the Sunni Muslim Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a former presidential rest home down the road - "Dreamland", the Americans call it - but this was not the extent of his soldiers' disorientation. "The men we are being attacked by," he said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom fighters." Come again? "Freedom fighters." But that's what Captain Cirino called them - and rightly so.

News, but not as we know it - (Full Story)

More than 100 newspapers have launched in Baghdad since the war, and the Iraqi media have revealed stories that need to be told. So why are the US-backed authorities imposing heavy-handed censorship?

07 October 2003

Freedom of the press is beginning to smell a little rotten in the new Iraq. A couple of weeks ago, the Arabic al-Jazeera television channel received a phone call from one of US proconsul Paul Bremer's flunkies at the presidential palace compound. The station had to answer a series of questions in 24 hours, its reporters were told. "They insisted that if we didn't go to them, they'd come for us," one of al-Jazeera's reporters told The Independent. And come they did - to drive the station's employees to the palace where they were handed a sheet of paper asking if they had been given advance notice of "terrorist attacks" or had paid "terrorists" for information. Al-Jazeera - along with its rival channel, al-Arabiya - had already been denounced by the US-appointed "Governing Council", currently led by the convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, and punished for their allegedly provocative programmes by being banned from the council's press conferences for two weeks.

Israel's attack is a lethal step towards war in Middle East (Full Story)

06 October 2003

Israel received the Green Light. It came from what is called the Syria Accountability Act, moving through the United States Congress with the help of Israel's supporters, that will impose sanctions on Damascus for its supposed enthusiasm for "terrorism" and occupation of Lebanon.

Oil, war and a growing sense of panic in the US  (Full Story)

Don't tell me that America would have invaded Iraq if its chief export was beetroot

01 October 2003

Oil is slippery stuff but not as slippery as the figures now being peddled by Iraq's American occupiers. Up around Kirkuk, the authorities are keeping the sabotage figures secret - because they can't stop their pipelines to Turkey blowing up. And down in Baghdad, where the men who produce Iraq's oil production figures are beginning to look like the occupants of Plato's cave - drawing conclusions from shadows on their wall - the statistics are being cooked. Paul Bremer, the US proconsul who wears combat boots, is "sexing up" the figures to a point where even the oilmen are shaking their heads.

A lesson in obfuscation. Just don't mention the oil. Or ask about the victims (Full Story)

29 September 2003

"The right thing ... a magnificent job ... heroes ... pride". So off Tony went again yesterday on Breakfast With Frost, spinning and spinning about Iraq.

Missiles strike at heart of US occupation  (Full Story)

28 September 2003

The man with the missiles was driving a white Toyota and pulled up in the leafy Baghdad suburb of Salhaya at 6.35 yesterday morning. Those who saw him said he climbed very calmly out of the car and placed a large battery on the road. Then he took seven rockets from the back seat and laid them on the tarmac. Using the battery as a ramp, he fired the first missile at the Rashid Hotel, fortress home to many of the senior American officials of the occupation authorities.

Lies, mischief and the myth of Western intelligence services   (Full Story)

28 September 2003

 They were at it again last week, the liars of our Western "intelligence" community. John Bolton, the US under-secretary of state for arms control and one of Donald Rumsfeld's cabal of pro-Israeli neo-conservatives, was giving testimony before the decidedly pro-Israeli sponsors of the Syria Accountability Act.

Palestinian, intellectual, and fighter, Edward Said rails against Arafat and Sharon to his dying breath  (Full Story)

26 September 2003

The last time I saw Edward Said, I asked him to go on living. I knew about his leukemia. He had often pointed out that he was receiving "state-of-the-art" treatment from a Jewish doctor and - despite all the trash that his enemies threw at him - he always acknowledged the kindness and honour of his Jewish friends, of whom Daniel Barenboim was among the finest.

Bomb destroys the media's illusions and claims another nameless victim (Full Story)

26 September 2003

Arasat is a quiet, uneventful suburb of Baghdad, a place of good restaurants serving moderate Lebanese wine, middle class and educated and absolutely unassociated with violence. So the bomb which stopped the clock of the Christian family across the road from the Aike Hotel - it showed 6.51am - also exploded many illusions. The American NBC television network was based in the pseudo-Greek apartment block, there was only one night-watchman and the reporters felt secure far from the American tanks and armoured personnel carriers that guard the Palestine Hotel and the other targets of opportunity in Baghdad.

Brutal reality that fans the flames of hatred in Iraq (Full Story) 

25 September 2003

If anyone wants to know why Iraqis set bombs for American soldiers, they had only to sit in the two-storey villa in this little farming village and look at the frozen face of Ahmed al-Ham and his angry friends yesterday.

Iraqi broadcasters risk being closed if they put Saddam's voice on air (Full Story)

24 September 2003

Sewage is coming through the manhole covers, there's still only 15 hours electricity a day and anarchy grips the streets of Baghdad, but yesterday America's toothless Iraqi "interim council" roared like a lion, issuing a set of restrictions and threats - against the press, of course.

Suicide bomber attacks UN Baghdad headquarters (Full Story)

23 September 2003

The United Nations. Again. Only last week, I'd stood at the little desk in the morning sunlight where the UN's Iraqi guards checked visitors to what's left of the headquarters after the previous suicide bomber came calling.

An Italian diplomat, his translator and another Iraqi tragedy (Full Story)

22 September 2003

Pietro Cardone is an elegant, discreet man, an Italian diplomat who hates polemics and who pleaded with me that his story should speak for itself. It does. Three days ago, he held in his arms his dying Iraqi interpreter, shot through the heart by an American soldier. Mr Cardone, 69, works for the occupation authorities. So did his translator. So did the soldier who killed his translator. But here tragic irony must give way to a terrible narrative. 

Iraqi councillor 'critical' after attack

21 September 2003

The assassins of Baghdad struck yesterday at one of the only three women on the American-sponsored Iraqi governing council, gravely wounding Akila al-Hashimi, a Shia Muslim who had worked at the country's foreign ministry under Saddam Hussein's regime.

Another day in the bloody death of Iraq (Full Story)

21 September 2003

At least 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been gunned down since the end of the war. Ahmed Qasm Hamed was dumped in a black sack at the mortuary of the Yarmouk hospital last week. Taleb Neiemah Homtoush turned up at the city morgue with three bullets in his head. Amr Alwan Ibrahim's family brought him to the morgue five minutes later with a bullet through his heart. Amr was to have married his fiancée Naghem in a week's time.

Americans draw a veil of secrecy as casualties grow (Full Story)

20 September 2003

No comment from the authorities while more and more US servicemen and their families are demanding answers from George Bush - A culture of secrecy has descended upon the occupation authorities in Iraq. They will give no tally of the Iraqi civilian lives lost each day. They will not comment on the killing by an American soldier of one of their own Iraqi interpreters yesterday - he was shot dead in front of the Italian diplomat who was the official adviser to the new Iraqi Ministry of Culture - and they cannot explain how General Sultan Hashim Ahmed, the former Iraqi minister of defence and a potential war criminal, should now be described by one of the most senior US officers in Iraq as "a man of honour and integrity".

Another day, another death-trap for the US (Full Story) 

19 September 2003

Eight American troops killed as Bush admits no link between Iraq and 11 September attacks -The American Humvee had burnt out, the US troop transporter had been smashed by rockets and an Iraqi lorry - riddled by American bullets in the aftermath of the attack - still lay smoldering on the central reservation.