Isis

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 20 April 2017

Goodbye then, Bal-ham. You were my gateway to the south. I loved you for so many more reasons than that, but the fact that I could get away from you and go down the A3 to the verdant grasslands of Cob-ham was probably one of the biggest ones, if I’m honest, so by and large Peter Sellers was right. It was a love/hate relationship. The dynamic of our life together was forged by the state line that runs through you, which is every bit as drastic as the Mexican border. My flat was a few hundred yards from the boundary between Lambeth and Wandsworth, so I have spent the past

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Islamic State claims responsibility for Paris terror attack

Just days before the first round of voting in the French presidential election, there has been a terrorist attack on the Champs Elysees. A gunman opened fire on police officers, killing one and wounding two others. The terrorist was shot dead at the scene. Islamic State have claimed responsibility for the attack.The claim says that the attacker is Abu Yusuf-al-Belgiki. This is fast by the group’s standards, suggesting some level of prior knowledge on their part. Candidates are already cancelling campaign rallies scheduled for tomorrow. But given that the man appears to have crossed into the country from Belgium, it is inevitable that this attack will push the issue of Islamist terrorism and the security

Friday

Seth J. Frantzman

Can Iraq’s Christians ever recover from Isis?

Since June 2014, when Islamic State attacked northern Iraq, the desks at Mar Ephrem seminary in Hamdaniya, a city 18 miles southeast of Mosul, have stood empty. Today, they are dusty and rooms once teeming with priests and nuns in training are dark; student ID cards, with titles such as ‘Syrian Catholic: Parish of Bashiqa, Iraq’, litter the floor and a statue of the Virgin Mary lies smashed. Now, Isis are gone. But in their wake an eerie quiet remains and the path of destruction is a visible reminder of their legacy, with thousands of houses destroyed in the fierce battle to retake the city last October. And for the Christians who live in Hamdaniya, the question remains: will they

Thursday

Ahmed Rashid

War-war, not jaw-jaw

It’s often said that the Trump administration is ‘isolationist’. This is not true. In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarisation of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced but it is happening, and much of it without consultation with Nato or other key allies, or any debate in Congress or the media. A few weeks ago, US aircraft carried out over 30 air strikes against Islamic militants in Yemen — almost the same as the number carried out there all last year. In Iraq and Syria there have been many reports of civilian casualties in US raids.

Andrew J.

Kaiser Donald

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

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Our dangerous impulse to make sense of murder

‘On Friday noon, July the 20th, 1714,’ begins the small, perfect 20th-century novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, ‘the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.’ In the coincidence of crossing the bridge at the same time, explains the writer, Thornton Wilder, these five seemed to have been assembled by pure chance. Or had they? He entitles this first chapter ‘Perhaps An Accident’. He spends the rest of his book tracing the lives of each until the moment when, in a twang of rope, fate hurled all together into the abyss. Thus is the reader’s interest engaged for the human histories that

Thursday

Tom Goodenough

Isis claim responsibility for Westminster terror attack

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for yesterday’s deadly terror attack in Westminster. Isis described the man involved – a British-born jihadist who has been named by police as Khalid Masood – as a ‘soldier of Islamic State’. The terror group released a short statement, saying: ‘The attacker yesterday in front of the British Parliament in London was a solider of the Islamic State, executing the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations’. The statement from Isis was published by the Amaq News Agency, a propaganda outlet with links to the organisation. Despite claiming responsibility for the attack, however, Isis released no further details about the man involved. Police said

Brian Martin

Prophesying doom

Boualem Sansal’s prophetic novel very clearly derives its lineage from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A totalitarian surveillance state, a fundamentalist religious autocracy, is portrayed as being totally intolerant of free-thinkers. This is a powerful satire on an Islamist dictatorship. It is unsurprising that Sansal’s writings are censored in his native Algeria. The religious structure of the political state is familiar. The one true god is Yolah and his prophet or ‘Delegate’ is Abi. Abi’s book, the Gkabul, is the foundation of the religion; it is sacrosanct and immutable. Places of worship are mockbas and the nation is named Abistan after the true disciple. There are nine calls to prayer each

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Israel Notebook | 16 March 2017

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

Thursday

Peter Carty

Descent into hell

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

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 23 February 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, sat on the steps of the throne, as a privy counsellor, watching the Lords debate the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill. The Supreme Court upheld the rule that Britons must earn more than £18,600 before their husband or wife from outside the European Economic Area can settle in Britain. Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan failed (on the grounds that they are of different sexes) in their Court of Appeal application to be allowed to enter into a civil partnership. The BBC said that in 28 out of 44 areas in England subject to NHS ‘sustainability and transformation plans’, hospital services would be reduced.

Thursday

Seth J. Frantzman

Syria is a world war without a solution

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

Paul Wood

‘Isis? Bomb those suckers’

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

Thursday

James Delingpole

Dual control | 19 January 2017

Revolting (Tuesdays) is the BBC2 comedy series that spawned the now-infamous sketch ‘Real Housewives of Isis’. It has been watched on the BBC’s Facebook page nearly 30 million times and rightly so because it is fearless, funny and near the knuckle. A pastiche of reality TV shows set in places like Beverly Hills, the sketch depicts three young British jihadi brides brightly discussing their domestic lives in some Raqqa-like hellhole. ‘Ali bought me a new chain,’ boasts one, ‘which is eight feet long. So I can almost get outside, which is great.’ Cue shot of black-hijabed housewife lurching towards the doorway of her bombed-out home, dragging the cooker to which

Thursday

James Forsyth

Europe is still struggling to face up to the terror threat

Europe’s unpreparedness to deal with the terrorist threat it is now facing is highlighted in two reports today. The Wall Street Journal has obtained a copy of the report prepared for the Belgium parliament on the failure of the Belgium authorities to stop the Islamic State terror cell who travelled from Belgium to carry out the 2015 Paris attacks. The report details a quite remarkable litany of incompetence, including the failure of the Belgium police to act on a warning that Salah Abdeslam had changed his social media profile picture to a picture of the Islamic State flag. The failure of Belgium’s various police and intelligence agencies to cooperate with

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 29 December 2016

What a fraught, divisive, infuriating sort of year it’s been. It started with me attempting to go on a blind date and being clocked by a speed camera doing 35 in a 30 in the dark on the way home. And on the way to the speed course, obviously, I pranged my car trying to park. I took this to be an omen. The ex-builder boyfriend was duly dusted off and put back into active service. In February, while having two new tyres fitted at a tyre shop in Wandsworth, I found myself being hit on by a jihadist tyre-fitter. We got chatting as I sat in his waiting room.

Daniel Hannan

Put out more flags

Did you know that 190 out of 200 nations in the world have either red or blue on their flags? (The wheel in the middle of India’s flag is blue, for example, and the Vatican flag has a red cord hanging from the keys.) Did you know that four of those 190 — Andorra, Chad, Moldova and Romania — have pretty much the same blue-yellow-red tricolour? Or that the stripes of the French flag are not of even width, but are proportioned 30-34-37? It’s an optical illusion: if the red, white and blue are of equal breadth, the flag looks curiously unbalanced. These are among the facts that you won’t

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Islamic State will want a landslide victory for Marine Le Pen

Yassine was one of the most popular teaching assistants at his primary school in Strasbourg. What is known in the French school system as an ‘animateur’, Yassine supervised the kids during their lunchbreak and in after-school activities. ‘Nice,’ ‘sociable’ and ‘attentive’ have been some of the words used by parents this week to describe the 37-year-old. Yassine had worked part-time at the school for a decade before he was taken on permanently in 2014 because of his popularity with the kids. Last weekend Yassine B [his surname hasn’t been disclosed] was arrested by the French security services after an eight-month surveillance operation. When police raided his flat they allegedly discovered

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Death by television

Forty years ago this month a film appeared, so prescient I wonder if its author, Paddy Chayefsky, saw the 2016 American presidential election campaign in a crystal ball. It was called Network and it foretold the rise of Donald Trump. The plot is King Lear appears on Newsnight: a newsman run mad. The protagonist is Howard Beale (Peter Finch), an anchorman at a failing network. The year is 1976, and America is embattled with inflation, depression and the end of the Vietnam war. It is not a time for American heroes, to paraphrase Chayefsky’s acolyte Aaron Sorkin writing in The West Wing. Beale’s ratings are low. He is fired. He

Thursday

Peter Oborne

A tale of two battles

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