Syria

How Syria collapsed

6 April 2024 9:15 pm

In April 2018 I was taken on a coach through miles of war-wasted urban landscape in the Syrian cities of…

Espionage dominates the best recent crime fiction

8 July 2023 9:00 am

Owen Matthews concludes his magnificent KGB trilogy, and there’s a thrilling debut from David McCloskey, a former CIA Middle East specialist

Who cares about Syria’s earthquake victims?

11 February 2023 4:07 am

At 4 a.m. on Monday, when the earthquake hit, most of the 4.5 million people living in northwestern Syria were…

The agony and frustration of reporting from the Middle East

1 October 2022 9:00 am

For 25 years, Abed Takkoush assisted foreign reporters like Jeremy Bowen when they arrived to cover the chaos and conflicts…

China’s Belt and Road to Damascus

25 July 2021 11:00 am

There is, it seems, no regime too odious to be a partner of China. Being repressive and corrupt have long…

A Damascene moment in London: Imad’s Syrian Kitchen reviewed

24 July 2021 9:00 am

Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is an eyrie off Carnaby Street, a once-famous road which seems to exist nowadays to sell trainers…

Looks lovely if nothing else: Craig and Bruno's Great British Road Trips reviewed

17 July 2021 9:00 am

To its huge credit, ITV has managed to find perhaps the last two television celebrities who’ve never before been filmed…

Isis’s weakness is now its strength

2 April 2021 5:00 pm

As coronavirus swept the globe a year ago, Isis began issuing pronouncements. ‘God, by his will, sent a punishment to…

TikTok's fake news problem

28 March 2021 6:00 pm

Something troubling is happening on TikTok. The video sharing app is sometimes dismissed as a place where young people go…

We shouldn’t forget the horrific crimes of Isis returnees

16 March 2021 7:00 pm

Summer 2015. A five-year-old girl is chained up and left outside in the desert sun in Fallujah, Iraq – a…

The twisted logic of Shamima Begum's defenders

16 March 2021 4:29 am

Shamima Begum is back in the news. Firstly because she’s had a makeover. She can be seen on the front…

Shamima Begum is not a victim

27 February 2021 10:50 pm

Adark cloud hangs over the Al Hol Camp where Shamima Begum is being held in North-Eastern Syria. She is said…

Macer Gifford: My fight against Isis

27 June 2020 9:00 am

A warning from the British trader who fought in Syria

Oil on troubled waters: the US-Saudi alliance is crumbling

16 May 2020 9:00 am

The US-Saudi alliance is crumbling

The art of the hermit

4 April 2020 9:00 am

Holed up in her sixth-floor London flat, Laura Freeman finds solace in the art of the hermit

The story behind Donald Trump’s fake withdrawal from Syria

2 November 2019 9:00 am

That noise you can hear is Donald Trump flip–flopping in the sand. Last week, American troops and dozens of tanks…

baghdadi

Stop all the clocks, Baghdadi is dead

29 October 2019 5:08 am

Bright eyes, burning like fire Bright eyes, how can you close and fail? How can the light that burned so…

endless wars

Does Trump have a better idea than endless wars?

22 October 2019 4:02 pm

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND…

Portrait of the week: Brexit uncertainty, Turkey in Syria and a Chinese threat

19 October 2019 9:00 am

Home Brexit teetered from uncertainty to uncertainty. Parliament had been summoned to sit on Saturday 19 October to debate what…

Kurdish politician Hervin Khalaf, who was apparently pulled from her car and executed last week by Turkish-backed paramilitaries [Photo: Getty]

Pax Russica: as Trump abandons Syria’s Kurds, Russia is ready to expand its empire

19 October 2019 9:00 am

While American troops were hurriedly leaving north-eastern Syria, a young female Kurdish politician called Hervin Khalaf was pulled from her…

Donald Trump’s shameful Syrian betrayal

10 October 2019 10:26 pm

Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria is one of the most shortsighted foreign policy miscalculations in recent memory.…

A member of the Syrian Democratic Forces holds up the group's flag (Getty)

The European fighters who battled Isis – and were abandoned by their governments

13 July 2019 9:00 am

Foreign fighters are returning from the battlefield — not Islamists but the Americans, Europeans and South Americans who fought to…

What would you do if you were a Syrian migrant?

1 June 2019 9:00 am

‘Put yourself in their shoes,’ says Zahra Mackaoui, a British-Lebanese journalist who has been following the stories of refugees from…

What one activist’s death tells us about war crimes in Syria

18 May 2019 9:00 am

In the 1990s film The Usual Suspects, the detective character explains how to spot a murderer. You arrest three men…

dick cheney

Vice vs vice: Cheney barbecues Pence in Georgia

12 March 2019 12:13 pm

It was no cakewalk for Vice President Mike Pence. He had showed up in Sea Island, Ga., reckoning that he…