Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the i Paper. His books include a memoir, The Broken Boy, as well as several studies of the conflict in Iraq and, most recently, Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied, on Claud Cockburn.
In Baghdad the Iraqi government is eager to give the impression that peace is returning. ‘Not a single sectarian murder or displacement was reported in over a month,’ claimed Brigadier Qasim Ata, the spokesman for the city’s security plan. In the US, the surge – the dispatch of 30,000 more American troops in the first half of 2007 – is portrayed as having turned...
There are 100,000 Turkish troops just across the northern Iraqi border preparing to launch an invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan in the hope of eliminating the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The US has labelled the PKK ‘terrorists’ and the Iraqi government – despite the arguments of its Kurdish members – has told the guerrillas to disarm or leave its...
Baghdad is now effectively a dozen different cities; they are all at war. On walls there are slogans in black paint saying ‘Death to Spies’. A Shia caught in a Sunni district will be killed and vice versa. Each side has its checkpoints: armed men in civilian clothes demand identity cards from drivers, and wave to one side those they suspect of being of the opposite religion; these...
The history of the American and British intervention in Iraq has been littered with spurious turning points over the last three years. The latest is the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the best publicised of the insurgent leaders, by US laser-guided bombs on 7 June in a house in Diyala province, north-east of Baghdad. The career of Zarqawi in Iraq was very strange. He was an obscure figure...
On 20 May, in a stuffy hall inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, behind the seven lines of sandbagged checkpoints, razor wire and sniffer dogs that protect it from the streets beyond, a new Iraqi cabinet was voted into office. Five months after they elected their parliament, Iraqis finally had a new government. This government included a minister for tourism but, despite the war raging across...
On 18th October 2016, the second day of the Mosul offensive, Patrick Cockburn discussed his latest book, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East with the Guardian’s...
To the end of his life, Claud Cockburn stuck to two core beliefs. The first was his instinctive scepticism and cynicism about all who hold authority. But it was his second core belief that really drove...
American intelligence saw Islamic State coming and was not only relaxed about the prospect but, it appears, positively interested in it.
This is a strange time in Iraq. Local actors and regional powers are watching each other and the Americans, waiting to see what the US election will bring. For their part, the Americans are...
In the early summer of 1956, an epidemic of poliomyelitis broke out in the city of Cork. It was not unexpected. The Irish medical authorities had noted the two-year gap between previous...
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