Robert Fisk

It is the death of history

Robert Fisk — 2007-09-17T11:08:00Z

A special investigation by Robert Fisk: the near total destruction of Iraq's historic past – the very cradle of human civilisation – has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation. - Robert Fisk / Independent

Iraqi insurgents offer peace in return for US concessions

Robert Fisk — 2007-02-09T07:10:00Z

For the first time, one of Iraq's principal insurgent groups has set out the terms of a ceasefire that would allow American and British forces to leave the country they invaded almost four years ago.

The present terms would be impossible for any US administration to meet - but the words of Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement show that the groups which have taken more than 3,000 American lives are actively discussing the opening of contacts with the occupation army. (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent

World ignores signs of civil war in Lebanon

Robert Fisk — 2007-01-27T22:03:00Z

in Beirut

This is how the 1975-90 conflict began in Lebanon. Outbreaks of sectarian hatred, appeals for restraint, promises of aid from Western and Arab nations and a total refusal to understand that this is how civil wars begin.

The Lebanese army lifted its overnight curfew on Beirut yesterday morning but the smouldering cars and trucks of a gun battle was matched only by the incendiary language of the country's bitterest antagonists. Beirut's morning newspapers carried graphic pictures of gunmen - Sunni Muslims loyal to the government and Shia supporters of Hizbollah - which proved beyond any doubt that organised, armed men are on the capital's streets. The Lebanese army - which constantly seeks the help of leaders on all sides - had great difficulty in suppressing the latest battles. (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent

We've all been veiled from the truth

Robert Fisk — 2006-10-24T21:15:47Z

Yes, the film O Jerusalem - loosely based on the epic history of the birth of Israel by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins - has reached Europe (mercifully, not yet Britain) and it is everything we have come to expect of the Hollywoodisation of Europe. It is dramatic; it stars the French singer Patrick Bruel as an Israeli commander; there is a flamboyant David Ben-Gurion - all white hair defying gravity - and Saïd Taghmaoui and JJ Feild as that essential duo of all such movies, the honourable, moderate, kind-hearted Arab (Saïd Chahine) and Jew (Bobby Goldman) whose friendship outlives the war between them.

We are used to this pair, of course. Exodus, based on Leon Uris's novel of the same 1948 events, contained a “good” Arab who befriends Paul Newman's Jewish hero, just as Ben Hur introduced us to a “good” Arab who lends Charlton Heston's Jehuda Ben Hur his horses to compete in the chariot race against the nastiest centurion in the history of the Roman Empire. Once we have established that there are “good” Arabs with hearts of gold, we are, of course, free to concentrate on the rotten kind. They murder a young woman in Exodus and they also kill a brave young woman during the battle for Latroun in O Jerusalem. (She is seen being partially stripped by her aggressor before being killed by a shell.) (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent

The Age of Terror

Robert Fisk — 2006-10-08T11:46:00Z

With chaos stretching from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, we have never lived in a more dangerous time. Over the next 15 pages and 7,000 words, our man in the Middle East looks back over a lifetime of covering war and death, and lays out a bleak future for all of us - one that even those living in the comfort of the Home Counties cannot escape

A few days after Lebanon's latest war came to an end, I went through many of the reporter's notebooks I have used in my last 30 years in the Middle East. Some contained the names of dead colleagues, others the individual stories of the suffering of Arabs and Kurds and Christians and Jews. One, dated 1991, is even splashed with a dark and viscous substance, the oil that came raining down on us from the skies over the Kuwaiti desert after Saddam blew up the wells of the Emirate. It was only after a few minutes that I realised what I was looking for: some hint, back in the days of dangerous innocence, of what was going to happen on 11 September 2001. (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent on Sunday

The US military and its cult of cruelty

Robert Fisk — 2006-09-16T19:10:00Z

In the week that George Bush took to fantasising that his blood-soaked "war on terror" would lead the 21st century into a "shining age of human liberty" I went through my mail bag to find a frightening letter addressed to me by an American veteran whose son is serving as a lieutenant colonel and medical doctor with US forces in Baghdad. Put simply, my American friend believes the change of military creed under the Bush administration - from that of "soldier" to that of "warrior" - is encouraging American troops to commit atrocities.

From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Bagram, to the battlefields of Iraq and to the "black" prisons of the CIA, humiliation and beatings, rape, anal rape and murder have now become so commonplace that each new outrage is creeping into the inside pages of our newspapers. My reporting notebooks are full of Afghan and Iraqi complaints of torture and beatings from August 2002, and then from 2003 to the present point. How, I keep asking myself, did this happen? Obviously, the trail leads to the top. But where did this cult of cruelty begin? (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent

Lebanon: "The Ceasefire Can't Work"

Robert Fisk — 2006-09-07T11:25:00Z

"The cease-fire can't work for all kinds of reasons...The UN are not going to block the Syrian border, the Lebanese army has to do it and they're not going to be able to - you can't - Syria is too big a country." - Robert Fisk / Democracy Now!

In the face of Bush's lies, it's left to Assad to tell the truth

Robert Fisk — 2006-08-16T11:12:00Z

In the sparse Baathist drawing rooms of Damascus, reality often seems a long way away. But it was a sign of the times that President Bashar al-Assad was able to bring the great and the good of Damascus to their feet by the simple token of telling the truth - which no other Arab leader has chosen to do these past five weeks: that the Lebanese Hizbollah guerrilla army has, in effect, won this round of their war with Israel.

There was plenty of hyperbole in the Assad speech. A conflict that has cost 1,000 Lebanese civilian lives can hardly be called a "glorious battle" but he did at least reflect more reality than his opposite number in Washington who, driven by self-delusion or his love of Israel, claimed that Hizbollah had been defeated in Lebanon. (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent

Desert of trapped corpses testifies to Israel's failure

Robert Fisk — 2006-08-15T14:50:00Z

They made a desert and called it peace. Srifa - or what was once the village of Srifa - is a place of pancaked homes, blasted walls, rubble, starving cats and trapped corpses. But it is also a place of victory for the Hizbollah, whose fighters walked amid the destruction yesterday with the air of conquering heroes. So who is to blame for this desert? The Shia militia which provoked this war - or the Israeli air force and army which has laid waste to southern Lebanon and killed so many of its people?

There was no doubt what the village mukhtar thought. As three Hizbollah men - one wounded in the arm, the other carrying two ammunition clips and a two-way radio - passed us amid the piles of broken concrete, Hussein Kamel el-Din yelled to them: "Hallo, heroes!" Then he turned to me. "You know why they are angry? Because God didn't give them the opportunity of dying." (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent

As the 6am ceasefire takes effect... the real war begins

Robert Fisk — 2006-08-14T06:39:00Z

The real war in Lebanon begins today. The world may believe - and Israel may believe - that the UN ceasefire due to come into effect at 6am today will mark the beginning of the end of the latest dirty war in Lebanon after up to 1,000 Lebanese civilians and more than 30 Israeli civilians have been killed. But the reality is quite different and will suffer no such self-delusion: the Israeli army, reeling under the Hizbollah's onslaught of the past 24 hours, is now facing the harshest guerrilla war in its history. And it is a war they may well lose.

In all, at least 39 - possibly 43 - Israeli soldiers have been killed in the past day as Hizbollah guerrillas, still launching missiles into Israel itself, have fought back against Israel's massive land invasion into Lebanon. (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent

Tea and rockets: café society, Beirut-style

Robert Fisk — 2006-08-13T11:10:00Z

Sunday, 6 August

In the early hours, motor-cycle riders have been racing down the Corniche outside my home. Petrol is cheap for motor-cycles, and at first I curse the roar of their machines. Then I realise that their insouciance is a form of resistance. In their special way, they are denying the war, refusing to be cowed.

A friend calls from Tyre where Palestinians are welcoming Shia refugees from the hill villages of southern Lebanon into their homes. One old Palestinian lady turned on her guest with memories of her own endless exile since 1948. "Better to die in your home than run away," she shouts. (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent on Sunday

Hizbollah's iron discipline is match for military machine

Robert Fisk — 2006-08-11T04:15:00Z

Much bellowing and roaring comes from Israel about a mass military attack all the way to the Litani river. But today, much less bellowing and roaring about "rooting out" the "weed" of the Shia Muslim Hizbollah "terrorists" who are supposedly - in Israel's fantasies, at least - an ally of America's enemies in the War on Terror (a conflict which, of course, we all religiously support).

A column of Israeli armour, which crept into the Lebanese Christian town of Marjayoun - largely populated by the Lebanese collaborators of Israel's occupation from 1978 to 2000 - turned north yesterday towards Khiam, a village already largely depopulated, to find that the Hizbollah guerrillas there refused to surrender. (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent

What do you say to a man whose family is buried under the rubble?

Robert Fisk — 2006-08-09T12:49:00Z

There were bulldozers turning over the tons of rubble, a cloud of dust and smoke a mile high over the smashed slums of Beirut's southern suburbs and a tall man in a grey T-shirt - a Brooklyn taxi driver, no less - standing on the verge of tears, staring at what may well be the grave of his grandfather, his uncle and aunt. Half the family home had been torn away and the entire block of civilian apartments next door had been smashed to the ground a few hours earlier by the two missiles that exploded in Asaad al-Assad Street.

What do you say to a man whose family is buried under the rubble? The last corpse had been a man whose face appeared etched in dust before the muck was removed and he turned out to be paper-thin - so perfectly had the falling concrete crushed him. Mohamed al-Husseini had left New York for a holiday with his young wife and infant child - they were safe in the centre of Beirut - because he wanted to see his family home and talk to the relatives he grew up with. (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent

Israel's promise of humanitarian corridors is exposed as a sham

Robert Fisk — 2006-08-09T12:48:00Z

So much for Ehud Olmert's "humanitarian corridors". Two weeks after the Israeli Prime Minister's comforting assertion - which no one in Lebanon believed - the Israeli air force has blown up the last bridge across the Litani river, in effect ending all humanitarian convoys between Beirut and southern Lebanon. Requests from humanitarian organisations for clearance from the Israelis are now being refused. Even the Red Cross admits there is now, in effect, a blockade on a vast area along the Lebanese border where thousands of civilians are still cowering in their homes.

David Shearer, the UN's humanitarian co-ordinator in Lebanon, has pleaded with the Israelis to end their attacks against the country's infrastructure and end all activities which threaten the transport of humanitarian aid to the displaced. But convoys since have been cancelled or forced to make long detours across the country and along the edge of the Lebanese-Syrian border. Truck drivers are frightened to risk their lives under Israeli air attack. I myself was on a Red Cross field trip from Qlaya to Jezzine when, close to the village of Arab Selim, an Israeli jet dropped a bomb on the road 80 metres in front of us. On the Litani river, north of Tyre, the main road bridge had been blasted away but the Lebanese army had constructed a temporary bridge over the water to the west. Now that, too, has been ripped to pieces by Israeli bombs. (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent

Crocodile tears of leaders as city burns

Robert Fisk — 2006-08-08T16:07:00Z

Shortly after 4am, the fly-like buzz of an Israeli drone came out of the sky over my home. Coded MK by the manufacturers, Lebanese mothers have sought to lessen their children's fears of this ominous creature by transliterating it as "Um Kamel", the Mother of Kamel. It is looking for targets and at night, like all the massacres being perpetrated by the Israeli air force across southern Lebanon, you usually cannot see it.

The latest model can even fire missiles. Well, it flew around for a few minutes before it moved south-west over the city in search of other prey. Then an hour later came the hiss of jets and five massive blasts as the southern suburbs received their 29th air raid. The Israelis must be convinced that beneath the rubble of their previous strikes, the Hizbollah have secret bunkers to direct their war in the south, that Hizbollah's television station - its four-storey headquarters a pancaked pile of rubble - must be staying on air because it has ever-deeper studios beneath the debris. I doubt it. (...)

- Robert Fisk / Independent