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Alice in Warland

The Age of Jihad. Islamic State and the Great War in the Middle East
Forfatter: Patrick Cockburn
Forlag: Verso Books
The West has believed in miracles in the Middle East, claims star journalist Patrick Cockburn. 




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Patrick Cockburn is one of the most respected journalists in the world, and has for many years reported from the Middle East to The Independent. Not infrequently, his predictions have proven to hold true – among other things, his predictions of how conditions would develop after the US invaded Iraq in 2003 were so accurate that it caught the attention of the world's leading politicians.

Great source of knowledge. Cockburn knows the conditions in the region in depth, and even a reader who plows through kilvoys of newspapers every day to stay up to date may be surprised by new details and connections.

The Western world has long suffered from "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" when it comes to the Middle East, he believes: the belief that "six impossible things will happen before breakfast". One of these impossible things was that it was possible to destroy IS and at the same time get rid of Syria's dictator Bashar al-Assad. Cockburn believes the United States and its allies in Europe refused to realize that al-Assad's fall would create a power vacuum that would inevitably be filled by IS and al-Qaeda-like depositors

From the inside. The Age of JihadIts greatest value lies in the close eyewitness accounts of people wounded during wars in the area. The author writes that the best way to learn about what's going on in a war-torn country is to visit military hospitals. Wounded soldiers and others involved in war incidents often get bored while in rehab, and are therefore eager to share what they have experienced. In July 2015, for example, Cockburn visited Hussein Teaching Hospital in the sacred Shiite city of Karbala, where a ward was reserved for wounded Shiite militia Hashid Shaabai. When Cockburn asks the soldiers what was the main reason why they lost to IS, the answer is that they did not receive enough military training, only three months of military training, which led them to make serious mistakes in the war.

Devilish details. One might wonder if The Age of Jihad is outdated, since it is a collection of essays from 2001 to 2015. However, its value lies both in being able to follow developments in the Middle East from month to month, and not least in that it gives us knowledge of gruesome details. This is what Cockburn writes on February 24, 2016: "Mosul people call it the 'Bitter' or 'The Clipper' – a metal instrument recently used by IS to punish women who do not completely cover their bodies with their clothes. A former school principal who left the city earlier this month says the tool causes indescribable pain when it cuts chunks of meat. "

Repetition in Yemen. Cockburn's book is very comprehensive. Among other things, it portrays the conditions in Yemen between 2009 and 2015 in-depth. The author announces his special love for this country: "It's physically very beautiful with cutstone villages perched on mountain tops on the side which are cut like hundreds of terraces making the country look like an exaggerated Tuscan landscape." In contrast to this beauty, he finds it appalling to see the United States repeat its fatal mistakes from Afghanistan and Iraq in the country.

Particularly strong impression is made of the story of Bahrain's female poet Ayat al-Gormezi, who was imprisoned and tortured after reading her own poem that offended the king in the country. She was beaten with electric cables and forced to wash toilets with only her hands. Afterwards, she was sent to prison, where she was tortured for a year.

Cockburn compares conditions in the Middle East with those in Europe after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, as Britain and France settled for the remnants of this empire. The comparison is good, not least because 30 million Kurds became stateless after the collapse, thus spreading throughout Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. Finally, one begins to see the end of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, which formed the basis of the division of the kingdom. The 22 million Kurds in northern Syria, 10 percent of the population, have now gained control of their own cities and achieved a high degree of autonomy. They will be able to continue to govern themselves, regardless of who may take over power in Syria in the coming years.

Checkmate. When Patrick Cockburn finally asks himself what all these eight different wars – seven in the Middle East and one in Somalia – are, he refuses to point out a single cause. He nevertheless fails to mention the demonization of both Gaddafi in 2001, Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Bashar al-Assad in 2011 – people often described as "the root of all evil".

The author sums up his book with a statement from the military expert Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington: "One of the problems is that we try to describe the situation as if it were black or white, while what we are actually witnessing, is a three-dimensional chess game with nine players and no rules. ”

Henning Næs
Henning Næss
Literary critic in MODERN TIMES.

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