Paul Wood was a BBC foreign correspondent for 25 years, in Belgrade, Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, Kabul and Washington DC. He has won numerous awards, including two US Emmys for his coverage of the Syrian civil war
When 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate left in Beirut’s port exploded last week, a three-year-old girl named Alexandra Najjar was torn from her mother’s arms as they ran inside from their balcony. In the same instant, every-thing in the apartment was flying through the air — doors, window frames, shards of glass, the air-conditioning unit,
Sir Anthony Eden’s wife, Clarissa, famously said that at times she’d felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through her drawing room. Over the past four years, perhaps American voters have felt the Volga lapping at their feet. There’s been no escape from Russia and even the Mueller inquiry did not put the matter
Just before Twitter started firing out messages about a ‘bomb’ in Beirut, our cleaner rang us in tears, shaking, telling us our house had been damaged by an explosion. Video from her phone showed our windows blown out and splintered furniture. There was debris in the street and wrecked cars at odd angles. A man
My friend ‘D’ is an instantly recognisable type in the Middle East: the middleman. He’s always chasing the next deal, always about to make millions. One scheme was to build a London Eye in a flyblown town in the Levant. Another was to buy a ‘Trump sex tape’ for $10 million. He invited me to
To be fair to president Donald Trump, he has not rushed to confront with Iran. Last June, he stopped airstrikes from going ahead – the US military ‘cocked and loaded’ – after a US surveillance drone was shot down and after Iranian actions threatened international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. He did not –
While American troops were hurriedly leaving north-eastern Syria, a young female Kurdish politician called Hervin Khalaf was pulled from her car and executed by the side of the road. Actually, the Kurdish media said she was raped and then stoned to death. They blamed one of the Arab militias being used by Turkey in its
In his memoir of office, Decision Points, George W. Bush writes about going to see Tony Blair in the Azores in the last days before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was a crisis meeting because they had failed to get a second UN resolution, to give legal cover for the war. This was
Look down from the mountains outside Beirut and, on most days, you’ll see a grey blanket of smog choking the city. The smog comes from diesel generators: almost every building in Lebanon is hooked up to one because of rolling power cuts. This isn’t because Israel bombed one of the country’s few power stations in
Beirut Television cameras get everywhere these days. Or maybe that was always true. Gore Vidal, the grand old man of American letters, wrote a book in which NBC gets the rights to the crucifixion, live from Golgotha, with St Paul as the ‘anchorperson’. So it was only faintly bizarre when CNN ‘crossed’ to a prison
Beirut: At seven in the morning of June 5th, 1967, Israeli warplanes took off to launch a surprise attack that would destroy the air forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq while they were still on the ground. The Syrian defence minister, Hafez al Assad, ordered a counterattack by his ground forces, tanks rumbling down from
The Daily Telegraph this week has a ‘scoop’ about the UK government giving permission for the Mueller inquiry to talk to former MI6 officer Christopher Steele about his evidence, which said Donald Trump was compromised by the Kremlin. The Telegraph story certainly sets the mood for President Trump’s state visit to Britain in eleven days’
In the 1990s film The Usual Suspects, the detective character explains how to spot a murderer. You arrest three men for the same killing and put them in jail. The next morning, whoever’s sleeping is your killer. That’s because the nightmare of being on the run is over. It’s a relief to be caught. ‘You
290 people have been killed in what is believed to be a series of Islamist attacks in Sri Lanka. Writing in The Spectator last month, Paul Wood says that while Isis’ territory has gone, the threat from jihadis has not gone away: Beirut As I write, Isis is still holding out on a few hundred
When Robert Mueller was appointed as Special Counsel, ‘[t]he President slumped back in his chair and said, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”’ This is just one of the beautifully telling vignettes from the Mueller report, published today. Another is Donald Trump saying to his lawyer, Michael
President Trump seems to be enjoying his presidency, for a change. His Twitter feed betrays none of the nervousness of the tense weekend when Mueller submitted his findings to the attorney general, William Barr. Then, for an extraordinary and probably unprecedented 24 hours, Trump’s Twitter fell almost silent. Now he writes, joyously: ‘No Collusion –
Washington REVERSE FERRET! When he edited the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie used to throw open his office door and bellow this at the newsroom when the paper had got a story wrong. It came from the northern endurance sport of ferret-legging: a pair of razor-toothed ferrets are put down your trousers — no underwear allowed. The
REVERSE FERRET! When he edited the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie used to throw open his office door and bellow this at the newsroom when the paper had got a story wrong. It came from the northern endurance sport of ferret-legging: a pair of razor-toothed ferrets are put down your trousers — no underwear allowed. The Sun
Beirut As I write, Isis is still holding out on a few hundred square yards of dirt in the village of Baghouz in Syria. This is all that remains of a ‘caliphate’ that was once almost half of Syria and a third of Iraq. The fighting has now gone on twice as long as the
We’re closing 2018 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 6: Paul Wood on the UK’s Donald Trump connection: Washington, DC When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu visited London in 1978, the British government did some serious sucking up. Ceausescu was an egomaniac and possibly crazy. When he went hunting outside
At an election-night party hosted by a leading light in the Clinton White House, the hostess wore blue, anticipating the ‘blue wave’ that Democrats hope is about to sweep away the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. As I write, the Democrats are up 14 seats. They need to gain 23 to win the
