Patrick Cockburn

From the award-winning author of The Rise of Islamic State, the essential story of the Middle East's disintegration The Age of Jihad charts the turmoil of today's Middle East and the devastating role the West has played in the region from 2001 to the present. Beginning with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Cockburn explores the vast geopolitical struggle that is the Sunni-Shia conflict, a clash that shapes the war on terror, western military interventions, the evolution of the insurgency, the civil wars in Yemen, Libya and Syria, the Arab Spring, the fall of regional dictators, and the rise of Islamic State. As Cockburn shows in arresting detail, Islamic State did not explode into existence in Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring, as conventional wisdom would have it. The organization gestated over several years in occupied Iraq, before growing to the point where it can threaten the stability of the whole region. Cockburn was the first Western journalist to warn of the dangers posed by Islamic State. His originality and breadth of vision make The Age of Jihad the most in-depth analysis of the regional crisis in the Middle East to date.

Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

The Age of Jihad

ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising

The Jihadis Return

Robert Fisk

From Hope to Despair

Arab Spring Then and Now

War and Resistance in Iraq

The Occupation

Muqtada-al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq

Muqtada

Kim Sengupta

This remarkable anthology chronicles more than three years of spiralling violence and despair in Syria: atrocity heaped upon atrocity, misery upon misery, and all - so far - to no avail. No faction is without blood on its hands; no crime, from torture to poison gas, has been deemed taboo. The dead are too numerous to count. As for the living, close to 3 million refugees have fled Syria, with millions more internally displaced. How did we come to this? There is no better way to answer this question than to revisit The Independent's published accounts of the unfolding tragedy. Spearheaded by peerless and profoundly experienced correspondents such as Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Kim Sengupta, our coverage has led the world in its fearlessness and insight. Syria's tragedy is not yet over.

Descent Into the Abyss

Syria

The essential “on the ground” report on the fastest-growing new threat in the Middle East, from the winner of the 2014 Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year Award Born of the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, the Islamic State astonished the world in 2014 by creating a powerful new force in the Middle East. By combining religious fanaticism and military prowess, the new self-declared caliphate poses a threat to the political status quo of the whole region. In The Rise of Islamic State, Patrick Cockburn describes the conflicts behind a dramatic unraveling of US foreign policy. He shows how the West created the conditions for ISIS’s explosive success by stoking the war in Syria. The West—the US and NATO in particular—underestimated the militants’ potential until it was too late and failed to act against jihadi sponsors in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan.

ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

The Rise of Islamic State

Henry Cockburn

On a cold February day two months after his twentieth birthday, Henry Cockburn waded into the Newhaven estuary outside Brighton, England, and nearly drowned. Voices, he said, had urged him to do it. Nearly halfway around the world in Afghanistan, journalist Patrick Cockburn learned from his wife, Jan, that his son had suffered a breakdown and had been admitted to a hospital. Ten days later, Henry was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Narrated by both Patrick and Henry, this is the extraordinary story of the eight years since Henry’s descent into schizophrenia—years he has spent almost entirely in hospitals—and his family’s struggle to help him recover. With remarkable frankness, Patrick writes of Henry’s transformation from art student to mental patient and of the agonizing and difficult task of helping his son get well. Any hope of recovery lies in medication, yet Henry, who does not believe he is ill, secretly stops taking it and frequently runs away. Hopeful periods of stability are followed by frightening disappearances, then relapses that bleed into one another, until at last there is the promise of real improvement. In Henry’s own raw, beautiful chapters, he describes his psychosis from the inside. He vividly relates what it is like to hear trees and bushes speaking to him, voices compelling him to wander the countryside or live in the streets, the loneliness of life within hospital walls, harrowing “polka dot days” that incapacitate him, and finally, his steps towards recovery. Patrick’s and Henry’s parallel stories reveal the complex intersections of sanity, madness, and identity; the vagaries of mental illness and its treatment; and a family’s steadfast response to a bewildering condition. Haunting, intimate, and profoundly moving, their unique narrative will resonate with every parent and anyone who has been touched by mental illness.

Living with Schizophrenia, A Father and Son's Story

Henry's Demons

Desde 2001, el periodista irlandés Patrick Cockburn ha realizado una cobertura sin parangón de los conflictos que han agitado el Medio Oriente. En sus crónicas, libres de ideas preconcebidas y en las que se sirve de su amplia experiencia directa y de su profundo conocimiento de la historia de la región, su capacidad para acertar en medio de crisis muy complejas ha demostrado ser extraordinariamente certera. Así, predijo que las invasiones occidentales de Afganistán e Iraq serían insostenibles, que era muy probable que los rebeldes libios terminaran enfrentándose entre ellos o que el levantamiento sunnita en Siria se extendería a su vecino Iraq. Y más sorprendente aún: fue él quien informó del surgimiento del Estado Islámico como fuerza principal en la zona, incluso antes de que los servicios de inteligencia del Gobierno fueran conscientes de la amenaza que representaba, lo que llevó al jurado de los British Journalism Awards a preguntarse "si no deberían las autoridades estudiar la posibilidad de jubilar al MI6 en bloque y contratar en su lugar a Patrick Cockburn".

La era de la Yihad

Middle East conflict and the Arab Spring: Gain insight and learn from two of the most acclaimed experts on the Middle East In December 2010, the “Tunisian Revolution” touched off a wave of protests, riots, revolutions and civil wars throughout the Middle East. Initially the world hoped for positive change – democracy, free elections, and human rights. But, by 2012 the Arab Spring had morphed into “Arab Winter” bringing death, destruction, and despair. The Independent’s Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn, two of the most acclaimed Middle East correspondents of our generation, examine the events of this regional tsunami that threatens to have an impact on our world for years to come.

From the award-winning author of The Rise of Islamic State, the essential story of the Middle East’s disintegration The Age of Jihad charts the turmoil of today’s Middle East and the devastating role the West has played in the region from 2001 to the present. Beginning with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Cockburn explores the vast geopolitical struggle that is the Sunni–Shia conflict, a clash that shapes the war on terror, western military interventions, the evolution of the insurgency, the civil wars in Yemen, Libya and Syria, the Arab Spring, the fall of regional dictators, and the rise of Islamic State. As Cockburn shows in arresting detail, Islamic State did not explode into existence in Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring, as conventional wisdom would have it. The organization gestated over several years in occupied Iraq, before growing to the point where it can threaten the stability of the whole region. Cockburn was the first Western journalist to warn of the dangers posed by Islamic State. His originality and breadth of vision make The Age of Jihad the most in-depth analysis of the regional crisis in the Middle East to date.

It is very easy to get polio. The celebrated Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn was just six years old when he woke up one day in the summer of 1956 with a headache and a sore throat. His parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, had recently returned to Ireland, to their house in East Cork, careless of the fact that a polio epidemic had broken out in Cork City. Cockburn caught the disease and was taken to the fever hospital where, alone for the first time in his life, he was kept in isolation. The virus attacks the nerves of the brain and the spinal cord leading to paralysis of the muscles. Patrick could no longer walk. "The Broken Boy" is at once a memoir of Patrick Cockburn's own experience of polio, a portrait of his parents, both prominent radicals, and the story of the Cork epidemic, the last great polio epidemic in the world, affecting 50,000 people. This terrible disease always behaved strangely, attacking the middle classes rather than the poor, children rather than adults, and striking fear everywhere.

A Memoir of Growing Up With Polio in Ireland

The Broken Boy

Σε αυτό το εκρηκτικό βιβλίο, ο διάσημος ανταποκριτής στην Μέση Ανατολή, Πάτρικ Κόκμπερν αναλύει τα γεγονότα που οδήγησαν στην κατάληψη από τους Τζιχαντιστές μιας τεράστιας έκτασης που εκτείνεται στα σύνορα Ιράκ-Συρίας.Μολονότι διέθεταν τις δυνατότητες να διεξάγουν θεαματικές επιθέσεις όπως αυτή της 11ης Σεπτεμβρίου 2001, οι οργανώσεις των Τζιχαντιστών, με πρώτη τη διαβόητη Αλ Κάιντα, δεν ήταν σημαντικές δυνάμεις με εδαφικούς όρους. Άλλωστε, η στρατιωτική τους ισχύ είχε δεχτεί ισχυρότατο πλήγμα με την αμερικανική εισβολή στο Αφγανιστάν. Σήμερα όμως όλα αυτά έχουν αλλάξει. Εκμεταλλευόμενοι τα στραβοπατήματα της Δύσης τόσο στους πολέμους του Αφγανιστάν, της Λιβύης και της Συρίας, όσο και στις λανθασμένες εκτιμήσεις αναφορικά με τη Συρία και τις εξεγέρσεις της Αραβικής Άνοιξης, οι Τζιχαντιστές έχουν πετύχει εντυπωσιακές νίκες που οδήγησαν στη δημιουργία ενός χαλιφάτου που εκτείνεται από τη σουνιτική ενδοχώρα του Ιράκ έως μεγάλα τμήματα της βορειοανατολικής Συρίας. Οι κοσμικές και δημοκρατικές πολιτικές που υποτίθεται ότι ήρθαν στο προσκήνιο με την Αραβική Άνοιξη έχουν θαφτεί από την επιστροφή των Τζιχαντιστών. Και, κατά πάσα πιθανότητα, για άλλη μια φορά, η Δύση θα καταστεί ένας από τους στόχους. Πώς πήγαν τα πράγματα τόσο στραβά; Στις περιγραφές του σ’ αυτές τις σελίδες, με την συνήθη ψυχραιμία και διαύγεια και αντλώντας από την απαράμιλλη εμπειρία του ως ανταποκριτή στην περιοχή, ο Κόκμπερν αναλύει το ξεδίπλωμα μιας από τις μεγαλύτερες πανωλεθρίες της εξωτερικής πολιτικής της Δύσης.

Το Ισλαμικό Κράτος και η νέα εξέγερση των Σουνιτών

Η επιστροφή των Τζιχαντιστών

Is the fall of ISIS the end of the perpetual war in the Middle East? In this urgent and timely book, Patrick Cockburn writes the first draft of the history of the current crisis in the Middle East. Here he charts the period from the recapture of Mosul in 2017 to Turkey’s attack on Kurdish territory in November 2019, and recounts the new phase in the wars of disintegration that have plagued the region. The ground battle with the caliphate is perhaps over, but was this the end of the conflict that has scarred these nations for decades? Cockburn offers panoramic on-the-ground analysis as well as a lifetime’s study of the region. And here he shows how peace appears a distant possibility with the continuation of conflict in Syria, Saudi Arabia’s violent intervention in the Yemen, riots in Baghdad and Tehran. At the same time, the rising aggression between Israel and Iran, the raising of stakes between the US, Russia and Turkey, shows that this remains the theatre of the proxy wars of the world’s superpowers. Has Trump abandoned the area for good, leaving a vacuum for others—Putin, Erdogan, Mohammed Bin Saud—to fill? He also looks at what might happen to the Islamic State: will it disappear now that it has lost its territory or emerge in a new form and with renewed violence?

The Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran

War in the Age of Trump

Andrew Cockburn

At the end of the Gulf War, the White House was confident that Saddam Hussein's days as Iraq's dictator were numbered. His army had been routed, his country had been bombed back into a pre-industrial age, his subjects were in bloody revolt, and his borders were sealed. World leaders waited confidently for the downfall of the pariah of Baghdad. Almost a decade later, they are still waiting. This is the first in-depth account of what went wrong. Drawing on the authors' firsthand experiences on the ground inside Iraq (often under fire) and their interviews with key players--ranging from members of Saddam's own family to senior officials of the CIA--Out of the Ashes tells what happened when the smoke cleared from the battlefields of the Gulf War. This tale of high drama, labyrinthine intrigue, and fatal blunders has been played out amid one of the greatest man-made tragedies of our times-one where, so long as Saddam Hussein remains in power, the Iraqi people will pay the price. Out of the Ashes makes chillingly clear just how terrible that price has been.

The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein

Out of the Ashes

An expose of the internal feuds in the CIA that doomed the secret operations to bring down Saddam Hussein. The authors are investigative journalists who covered the story from inside Iraq. They offer insights into the psyche of Saddam and his family, bodyguards and extended tribal family, as well as his weapons of mass destruction.

Jihad-bewegingen hebben zich sinds het begin van de eenentwintigste eeuw vooral laten gelden door terroristische aanvallen, met als meest recente voorbeeld de aanslagen in Parijs van januari 2015. Patrick Cockburn toont in zijn nieuwe boek aan dat de Jihadi’s tegenwoordig meer zijn dan een aantal losjes verbonden terroristische bewegingen, maar dat zij in het Midden-Oosten een snel groeiende territoriale macht vormen. Dat met deze beweging terdege rekening moet worden gehouden werd in de zomer van 2014 duidelijk met het ontstaan van het zelfbenoemde kalifaat van de IS dat grote delen van Irak en Syrië in handen heeft, gehoorzaamheid van alle moslims eist en geen andere geloofsovertuigingen duldt.

de opkomst van IS en de soennitische opstand

De nieuwe Heilige Oorlog

Looks at why and how all other countries support wanes and why the US is once fighting the battle and left holding the bag in the poli-geo fraught area

The West Shakes Up the Middle East

Iraq

A portrait of the formidable Shiite figure who has been predicted to be a future leader in Iraq, this book describes his rise from a resistance fighter, the assassinations of his family members, and his frequent confrontations with the American military.

Patrick Cockburn

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