Victory palms. GRAPHIC: EMILY JOHNS
On 2 February 2017, Phil Shiner, the award-winning human rights lawyer who brought the UK government to account for the 2003 killing of the Iraqi hotel receptionist Baha Mousa, was struck off by the solicitors disciplinary tribunal (SDT). In March 2017, Shiner, who was also ordered to pay interim costs of £250,000, was declared bankrupt, and was reported to be in poor health.
Shiner and his legal firm, by fighting for victims of the Iraq war, had…
On 24 March, Airwars, a transparency NGO monitoring civilian casualties from international airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Libya, sent out an email warning that the escalation of US strikes was threatening to overwhelm its capacity to monitor and assess the civilian impact.
Airwars wrote: ‘Following an unprecedented number of alleged Coalition civilian casualty events and casualties in recent weeks, Airwars has taken the difficult decision to suspend detailed assessing of alleged…
In this collection of original news reporting and analysis, journalist Patrick Cockburn describes in detail the long build-up to the establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq. Arranged as a series of diary entries, these reports give a clear picture of how the lasting effects of UN sanctions in the ’90s, invasion and regime change in 2003 and the resulting devastating civil war all contributed to the formation of ISIS. The book also covers the recent conflicts in…
It has been right under the media’s nose, but they have decided not to follow up one of the most politically-explosive aspects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, something that I exposed back in 2002 using publicly-available sources, and which has now been verified by Chilcot’s declassified documents.
The single most attention-grabbing aspect of the Chilcot report into the war and occupation was the personal note the then-prime minister…
UN weapons inspectors were not sent into Iraq in 2003 in order to find out the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). As far as US president George W Bush was concerned – and, for most of the time, British prime minister Tony Blair – the inspectors were sent in to help set the stage for war. If they could be helpful in this role, they were to be supported. If they got in the way, they were to be undermined and, eventually, destroyed.
…
What did we learn from Chilcot? Among other things, that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was indeed a war for oil.
The day after the long-awaited Chilcot report into the Iraq war was published, the energy editor of Financial Times, Andrew Ward, explained how documents released as part of the report ‘lay bare the desire of UK companies for a share of the spoils from the opening of Iraq’s oil and gas fields once Saddam Hussein’s regime was…
A Letter to the Prime Minister, Jo Wilding's Diary from Iraq - trailer from Julia Guest on Vimeo.
Jo Wilding’s Eye Witness account of the war and occupation of Iraq between 2002- 2004.
The film focuses on the effect of sanctions and war on civilians and where this breached Geneva conventions.
It is an eye…
I just read the transcript of the evidence given by John Chilcot, head of the Iraq Inquiry, to parliament's foreign affairs committee on 4 February. I was staggered to read in a footnote that they are going to publish 1,500 British government documents alongside the Chilcot Report itself…
In the run-up to the publication of the Chilcot Report into the Iraq war, I've been thinking I might try to read all the evidence given during the inquiry. There's quite a lot of it up on the inquiry website. For no particular reason, I started with the evidence given in a private session by Richard Dearlove, who was head of the secret intelligence service (better known as MI6) at the time.
The…
Sentenced last year to 35 years imprisonment for leaking thousands of classified files to Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning’s real crime was embarrassing the US government and exposing some of the brutal realities of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Clark Stoeckley’s crudely-illustrated non-fiction graphic novel provides an accessible precis of Manning’s trial, taking us from her first pre-trial hearing in December 2011 through to her sentencing in August 2013. Along the way, we learn…
If you want a concise, thoughtful background briefing on the ISIS crisis, this is it – written by a journalist with three decades of experience in the region. This is a compelling account of how the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has managed to conquer an area the size of Britain. Patrick Cockburn knew something was coming: he nominated Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, as the Independent’s ‘man of the year’ for the Middle East on
1 January, days before ISIS…
CRUDIFICATION, an Iraqi Fine Artists Association in
Britain Group show in London, features the work
of Jalal Alwan (pictured), and others. www.p21.org.uk
Just over ten years since it failed the public so completely over the 2003 Iraq War, the mainstream media’s coverage of the current Iraq crisis has been predictably awful.
“Stop droning on Mr Cameron… SEND IN THE DRONES” was The Sun’s considered…
Just over ten years since it failed the public so completely over the 2003 Iraq War, the mainstream media’s coverage of the current Iraq crisis has been predictably awful.
“Stop droning on Mr Cameron… SEND IN THE DRONES” was The Sun’s considered front page on 4 September 2014. At the opposite end of the British press spectrum The Independent’s…
The crisis in Iraq has reached truly frightening proportions, with the brutal ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ (ISIS) controlling a large swathe of territory in both countries – something that may trigger the partition of Iraq.
It is easy to get the impression from the mainstream media that violent conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq is something that goes back millennia, and has merely re-surfaced in the recent conflict between Sunni ISIS and the Shia-dominated…
‘Far from reducing international terrorism... the 2003 invasion [of Iraq] had the effect of promoting it,’ a study by a military think-tank at the heart of the British establishment has concluded. The report by the Royal United Services Institute, ‘Wars in Peace: British Military Operations Since 1991’, concludes that: ‘The rise of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was a reaction to this invasion, and to the consequent marginalisation of Iraq’s Sunni population (including de-Ba’…
