Iraq

What will Britain do to help the Yazidis? And will MPs get a say?

After President Obama announced air strikes against Isis and humanitarian aid drops to the Yazidis, British ministers have been clarifying the extent of their involvement in the response to the latest violence. Michael Fallon said this lunchtime that the UK government’s focus was on the humanitarian effort: ‘We welcome what the Americans are doing now to, in particular, to bring humanitarian relief, and to prevent any further suffering. But our focus is on assisting that humanitarian mission and using our military in support of the Americans in terms of refuelling and surveillance to underpin their missing and to add to it with food drops of our own. ‘Our focus is

Douglas Murray

The three golden rules of intervention

Barack Obama has authorised the use of targeted airstrikes in Iraq against forces of the Islamic State, which are hell-bent on massacring Yazidi and Christian minorities, and threatening American assets and citizens. David Cameron has welcomed Barack Obama’s decision. There are already voices calling for wider deeper intervention; special forces and conventional ground troops have been mentioned by former US generals and diplomats. Interventions have a habit of escalating, a point that Douglas Murray made in The Spectator this time last year when Barack Obama and David Cameron were preparing to intervene in Syria. Douglas urged Obama and Cameron (and any other statesmen considering intervention) to prepare throroughly: ‘The repercussions

Melanie McDonagh

Thank God we’re intervening in Iraq again

Yesterday, I had a succession of texts from one of the priests in my local parish, Mgr Nizar, who heads the Iraqi Catholic church in London, asking, with increasing urgency, what could be done for the Christians in Quaraqosh, in Ninevah, where most of Iraq’s  remaining Christians live. ‘The situation is very bad,’ he wrote. ‘200,000 Christians are displaced. All the Christian cities fallen in the hands of ISIS.’ Another read: ‘Our cities are empty now and the people on the street sleeping and nowhere to go.’ The last time we spoke, he was agonised about the Christians displaced from Mosul, including most of his own family, under the threat

Freddy Gray

Obama moves against ISIS. This time, it’s a war worth fighting

Back to Iraq, then. President Obama’s announcement last night that America would intervene militarily in defence of the Kurds is by any standards a stunning development. The President, whom hawks loathe for being a ditherer and a peacenik, has turned into action man, albeit still rather a cautious action man. Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham – the most reliably war-thirsty politicians in Washington – released a statement approving his decision, though of course they used it as an excuse to berate Obama for his failures in the Middle East: ‘The President is right to provide humanitarian relief to the Iraqi civilians stranded on Mount Sinjar and to authorize military

A world crisis with no world leader

There was a time when having almost two hundred of your citizens blown out of the sky was a big deal for a western democracy. But when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine last month, killing 193 Dutch citizens and a couple of dozen other Europeans, the response was conspicuous public mourning, some mild objections, a soupçon more sanctions, but otherwise nothing. Everyone knew which government might have handed powerful surface-to-air missiles to eastern Ukraine’s rebels. But nobody seemed willing or able to do anything much about it. There was also a time when whole swaths of the map being overrun by Islamic groups who make al-Qa’eda

Baroness Warsi was over-promoted, incapable and incompetent

Farewell then Sayeeda, Baroness Warsi. The most over-promoted, incapable and incompetent minister of recent times has finally done the nation one service and resigned. This morning she announced on Twitter that she can ‘no longer support government policy on Gaza.’ That would be government policy that now includes reviewing all arms export licenses to Israel? Not strong enough for Sayeeda, it would seem. It was not hard to see this coming. Not just because Warsi’s Twitter activity in recent weeks has mainly consisted of pumping out support for Hamas-run Gaza and berating supporters of Israel for saying things she disagrees with, but also because she has shown a career-long sympathy

Look where Tony Blair’s messianic fervour has left us

While trawling down the Mail Online’s right-hand-side of the page porno strip, to consider analytically the latest photographs of Jessica Alba in a swimming costume, I came across a rather good piece of journalism by Stephen Glover. Yes, yes; you know this already. But the horrors inflicted by US/UK liberal evangelism on the world (and then later, by extension, on ourselves) cannot be understated. Liberal evangelism and, as Glover has it, arrogance and narcissism on the part of primarily Tony Blair. To which we might add an abiding stupidity, too. And a messianic fervour. It was always the case that no matter how foul the despots who ran those ghastly

In Iraq, ancient Christianity lies in ruins. But who cares?

The Mar Behnam monastery outside Mosul, seized by ISIS just over a week ago, bears an inscription in the Turkic language of the Mongols who invaded Iraq in the 13th century. It asks for ‘the peace of Mar [Saint] Behnam to come down and rest on the Khan, his elders and his wives’. Why should Mongols revere Behnam, a convert to Christianity who was martyred by the region’s Zoroastrian ruler in the fourth century? The answer is that the Church of East to which Behnam converted had been the world’s greatest Christian Church. Its missionaries were firmly established in China by the seventh century. It was independent of both Rome

The MH17 disaster

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told Parliament that President Vladimir Putin of Russia should end his country’s support for separatists in Ukraine, some of whom it had provided with a training facility in south-west Russia. Licences to export arms to Russia were found still to be in place. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, announced a public inquiry into the death of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer who died in 2006 in a London hospital after he was poisoned with polonium. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, was criticised by some MPs from rival parties for appearing on television sampling tequila instead of somehow doing something

‘It’s jihad, innit, bruv’: meet the British Muslims going to fight in Syria

Turkey, Syria, Iraq: ‘It’s jihad, innit, bruv.’ The young British Muslim cut an absurd figure in ski mask, dark glasses and hoodie. He had not used that exact phrase but it would have summed up our faintly comical encounter. I remembered a security analyst’s remark that British Islamists in the Middle East are best explained by Four Lions, the mock documentary about some Yorkshire jihadis on an incompetent quest for martyrdom. He called himself ‘Obeid’ and he described, in a Leeds or Bradford accent, how he had arrived in Turkey on a tourist visa. Then, speaking no Arabic, and barely knowing one end of a Kalashnikov from the other, he

As Christians are massacred in Iraq, laid-back Obama maintains his shameful silence

Christians in Mosul have been offered three choices by ISIS: 1. Convert to Islam. 2. Pay the ‘jizya’ tax that renders them dhimmis – i.e., second-class citizens granted limited protection if they hand over half an ounce of pure gold. 3. Death by the sword. They had until noon today to make up their minds. Bit of a no-brainer, really. Mosul’s Christians – Catholics and Orthodox who until this month had celebrated Mass in the city every Sunday for 1,600 years – are fleeing for safety. Perhaps, by the time you read this, Barack Obama – a weekly worshipper at a crazy rabble-rousing church while he was running for office in

Impeaching Obama would be crazy. But the Republicans will probably try

 Washington DC So it’s come to this: the only thing that can save President Obama from his own complacent and lofty self-regard, not to mention his serial failures, are his enemies, and that is what it appears they are about to do. Even as his poll numbers sink to new lows that not even George W. Bush or Richard Nixon sunk to, even as the economy continues to falter, even as the so-called US-Mexico border devolves into chaos, even as al-Qa’eda’s successor establishes its own state in the ruins of Syria and Iraq, and even as the Democrats appear on the verge of losing the Senate as well as the

The eternal allure of the Caliphate

There’s nothing like a caliphate to rally disparate groups. The Sunni Islamic organisation ISIS has recruited fighters from all over the world with its dream of a single Muslim state, which now apparently exists in parts of Iraq and Syria. Across Europe, young men are packing their bags and heading to the east to join the jihadis. It’s an odd thing to want to do, but there’s something about a caliphate. In India in the 1920s, thousands of Muslims rallied behind the idea of a caliphate to support the Ottoman Caliphate. It was surprising because the Muslim population in India had never shown unity or indeed any fondness for Turkey.

Baghdad notebook: “Things were better in Saddam’s time”

In the passport queue at Baghdad airport, my heart sinks. This place vies with Cairo for the title of most venal airport in the Middle East. Our luggage is minutely examined by the Mukhabarat, or secret police, then customs. Early morning becomes mid-afternoon. Our papers (scrupulously in order) lie unattended on a desk. Eventually, a customs man, with a large moustache and belly hanging over his belt, waddles over. ‘We cannot stamp these today,’ he says. ‘We will have lunch now, and then we will sleep. Come back tomorrow. Or the next day.’ Our bags are moved into a room piled high with luggage seized from other TV crews: flak

Rod Liddle

I like the look of this exciting new Islamic State. But why don’t they want Belgium?

There is something attractive about almost the whole of southern Europe being part of an immense and somewhat rigorous caliphate, as promised by the exciting Sunni Islamic movement formerly known as Isis. This new entity, stretching from Santander in what we currently know as Spain, to Cox’s Bazar on the Bangladesh and Burmese border, would handily encapsulate 98 per cent of the worst countries in the world, as defined by me out of rank prejudice, but also by various more scientific UN criteria. It is a little disappointing, in my opinion, that Isis — or ‘The Islamic State’ as it now wishes to be known — has excluded both France

After 100 years, the mess we made of the Middle East is coming full circle

When I hear the words Sykes-Picot I more often than not feel like punching an Englishman or a Frog — any Englishman, any Frog — in the mouth, but then I think of François Georges-Picot’s granddaughter Olga, and my pugilistic thoughts turn to romantic mush. More about those two arrogant and ignorant fools later, but first Olga. I was 22 and she was 19 or 20 and we met in New York where she was studying acting and I was studying girls. It was love at first sight and we swore we’d never ever look at anyone else ever but then the summer ended and we never saw each other

Jihadists to Joe Bloggs: a ‘Snoopers’ Charter’ would mean everyone could be spied on

Theresa May has suggested she may reignite plans for a ‘snoopers’ charter’, in order to provide intelligence services with greater surveillance powers.  She has called for new powers in order to respond to the terror threat from British jihadists returning from the Middle East.  In September 2012, Nick Cohen explained in The Spectator why a communications data bill would be a dangerous thing: Ever since the millennium, I have wondered how long the utopian faith in the emancipatory potential of the web will last. Of course, we know the new technologies give the citizen new powers to communicate and connect. We hear this praised so loudly and so often, how could

Liam Fox warns on security spending and on avoiding Iraq

The Cabinet is split between doves and hawks on whether Britain should back US involvement in Iraq, but this morning Liam Fox argued on the Andrew Marr Show that whether or not the Uk avoids military action, it will not be able to avoid the threat from jihadists. he said: ‘Remember, the West is seen as a single entity. There are those who say if we don’t get involved, if we hunker down, then we’ll be fine, there’ll be no backlash. That is utterly, utterly wrong because the jihadists don’t hate us because of what we do; they hate us because of who we are and we can’t change that.

Britain is not alone in its mad attitude to Islamism

There is a tendency in Britain to think we are alone in our national madness. So I thought I would cheer everyone up on this lovely weekend by pointing out that one of the big stories in the Netherlands this week has been whether or not a pro-ISIS demonstration should be allowed in the Hague. The demonstration was planned to take place outside the Iraqi Embassy. There are of course some who are strongly pro-ISIS in the Netherlands. There are also some who are against. Most importantly there is also a political class which has been carefully weighing up the alleged undesirability of ISIS with the historic Dutch tradition of free speech. I

The Security Services have lost track of 1 in 4 of those who’ve gone to fight in Syria

We have just had a second intelligence failure on Iraq. The speed and extent of ISIS’s sweep into the country took the UK governnment by surprise. Whitehall was not alone in this. As I reveal in the magazine this week, when representatives of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff came to London recently, Iraq was way down their agenda. What makes this intelligence failure so worrying is that we are relying on the security services to keep track of the 400-odd Britons who have gone to fight with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Senior government figures believe that of those who have gone to Syria and then returned to the